


Simra Hishkari - 3 - Forth and Back

by Sunderlorn



Series: Simra Hishkari: Dunmer of Skyrim [4]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: A Whole Lotta Lurking, Amateur discourse upon the principals that underlay onager operation, Ashlander roadtrip, Astrology Explained by Amateurs, Bastardry of Questionable Magnificence, Black Tea; Roasted Green Tea; Mendacitea; Audacitea, Career advice for prospective freelancers: avoid sieges, Dermatologically Inadvisable Bath-Oils, Discourse upon the nature progress and regression of window designs in 4th Era Morrowind, Dunmer - Freeform, Fics Within Fics Within Fics, Gen, Headhunting (and for once I don't mean literally), History retold by an amateur, Implied McCarthyism -- in the Cormac sense, In which the Pillagers become the Pillaged, Maybe it's hypothermia; maybe it's crippling depression, Medicinal Broth, More Necromancy I'm afraid, Morrowind, Of course teleportation and long-distance communication are fucked up why would they not be?, Oh yeah and a whole lot of people, Philogenically Unlikely Boys, Plucky Kids, Post Red Year, Scrumping For Weird Bug Eggs, Sexual Assault Mention, Some guar were harmed in the making of this fic and I am deeply sorry, TFW fate throws a Fraternal Double-Act in the works, The Looting of Sweet Loot, Umbriel turns everything it passes over into Dark Souls sorry I don't make the rules, Unreliable Narrator, Unwanted Guests and the Crashing of Roadtrips, We leave you alone for five years Simra and what the fuck, Wild passionate headcanoneering with no basis in canonicity, Wisewomansplaining, Yeah okay being an adult sucks too, Yeah sorry tea's a major plot device now, Yes I put in another Vast And Trackless Steppe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-23
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2018-09-26 11:10:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 69
Words: 148,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9893009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunderlorn/pseuds/Sunderlorn
Summary: After five years making his living in Morrowind, Simra Hishkari endeavors to cross the province into Vvardenfell, hoping to connect with his Zainab ancestors. Guided and aided by two ashlander wisewomen, Tammunei Ereshkigal and their half-sister Noor, the journey will be a long one, revealing Simra's recent past as much as it will determine his future.





	1. Chapter 1

**Morrowind in the late second century of the 4th Era. My map of it. At least for the purposes of this story.**

Red represents the territories of Great House Redoran. Blue, Great House Dres. Brown, Great House Telvanni.

Purple represents the territories of Great House Indoril and the New Temple of the Reclamations.

Territories coloured in yellow represent the remaining holdings of the House Hlaalu, formerly Great.

Please note, while there are aspects of this map that take their cues from canonicity, like so much in my writing it's

way more indebted to headcanon and projected possibilities and wouldn't-it-be-cool-if's than official canon.

 

* * *

 

_When a body’s abandoned, unburied, unburnt, the eyes are always the first to go. Ants or racers, buzzards or crows — the scavengers change their skins, but their habits stay the same. Whether in Skyrim or Morrowind, some things hold true. So much here, so much there, as much as anywhere else — that way runs my reckoning._

_I wonder: was it the same with Bodram’s windows? There must have been glass once, in the eye-sockets of all these buildings, but something emptied them out._

_What I know of history’s a thing of pieces and patchwork. Areas of detail, embroidered bright, then swathes of plain fabric — holes in the wholecloth. What do I know of the War of the Blue Divide, for instance? Nothing, except that there was one. But I do know that once, Bodram was Hlaalu._

_Budding up at the flat-valley fork where the local River Tonlun tributes into the longer broader River Balda that snakes through all of Stonefalls, Bodram is hemmed by water to east and south, and shows a walled face to the western mountains. A place to deal with the hillfolk, in whatever way was needful. A safe space for trade in times of peace, or to buy the hill-clans’ brute strength with silk and shils when House Hlaalu had enemies. And when feuds, or hunger of one kind or another, turned the hillfolk warlike, Bodram was built able to turn them back._

_What I do know, is that when the hillfolk came to inherit Bodram, it wasn’t by right of conquest. Or rather, they conquered it as the Hlaalu conquer: they made Bodram too expensive to keep, and offered a deal to its desperate owners. But by then they called their tribe a House, and called themselves the Sadras. Council-seated, technically Great, with numbers swelled by the hill-clans that rallied to their banner, or were forced to their knees beneath it. Say whatever kind of sourness you will of the Sadras and no doubt I’ll say it with you, but to call them all fools would be false._

_This doesn’t mean, though, that there are no fools at all among the Sadras. There are imbeciles and easy marks wherever you look in the world, and sometimes you need only catch a clever person from a particular angle for them to show themselves a simpleton._

_There’s no knowing whether the Sadras lord with Bodram in their charge was a fool by nature or only had a foolish moment on the day that Bodram was sacked. Were they too proud to watch the plains as much as the peaks around them? Or being from a line of mountainside nix-herds, did they not know a guar’s head is full of buoyant fat, and that this makes them fair swimmers? Or were they young, born to ease and wealth, more House Dunmer than hillsmer, with no knowledge of why anyone might bother to raid in Winter?_

_Anycase, when the Vereansu came, they crossed the Tonlun. Maybe they swam, shooting as they came. Maybe they came in the cold-months, with hunger to drive them over the river while it stayed low and shallow, logged up with ice at its source. Anycase, the Sadras failed to stop them._

_And I wonder: when that warband came, were Bodram’s windows first to go, before the buildings burnt? Did the clansmer smash them for plain-glass, like a crow opens up a corpse’s eyes to get at the jelly inside? Because when the Sadras made their return, what they inherited from themselves and the long-moved-on Vereansu, was a boneyard. A beach of empty shells to crab into as they rebuilt. Empty eye-sockets in the faces of empty houses._

 

Should he mention the parchment panes that covered the empty frames? Skins scraped and stretched til they let the light through, weatherwaxed against the rain, wind, and cold. It was Sadras work, riding on the back of once-Hlaalu design. For all they might be a House now, the Sadras were hillfolk yet at heart, and it showed in their crafts.

Things reflect their makers, Simra reckoned, and for that, the parchment windows were interesting. Ghosts only know, he’d puzzled over them long enough, wondering how they’d take ink… Write them down, and he’d record by reflection the people that made them. And wasn’t that the whole point of all this writing? A record? Partly.

But a city of eyeless skulls, wind in at every window and moaning in every corner? That was a better story. A grosser more glittering lie. How many travellers would come now to faded far-flung Bodram and find him out in its telling? And if they did, he’d only say: I wrote as I saw it, when I saw it; not once did I say it wouldn’t ever change.

Simra dipped the black iron nib of his pen once more.

 

_And yet Bodram is rebuilding itself. Blooming from the ash, like Morrowind herself has, over and over, even before the Chimer. But today it’s back to a bud once more — an enclave of inhabitation, regrown from all the waste and harrow around it. A double-handful of hearths in a ruin of scorched shells, and the crumbling bones of buildings, eyeless still with stolen glass._

_Bodram is also where this story begins, and where it ends, and begins again._

 

Kreshfibre, ragpress, the pages of his journal dragged rough as he wrote. Every stroke of his pen seemed to catch, pushing as he pulled, pulling as he pushed. Resisting. It had been the same since buying the little clothbound book. Pretty covers, dyed in swirls of purple, stitched in dove-silver thread at the edges, but the paper inside was poor, and each leaf smaller than Simra would’ve liked. After a year with no means to write, he’d been desperate, starved, and poor again. He’d bought the first notebook Sadrith Mora offered him. Since then not a day went by he didn’t regret the string-and-some of shils he’d spent on it.

A journal’s something you’ve got to live with, he reckoned. Like a pair of shoes. No sense scrimping on quality. But no, unlike shoes, and like so many other things, it was better to have a bad one than have none at all.

The gloom inside the cornerclub had grown. Every tall window in its long and canted roof-wall faced east, designed to catch the dawn but doing bad work with the dusk. The shadows in the commonroom deepened til ink, dark, and the table’s black lacquer were all one: the same muddy shade of useless.

Simra kissed his teeth into the half-empty quiet.

The short island of bar at the dug-out’s far end was starred with slowburning lamps. A tired server with sour brown hair wandered down the long communal table, setting down more lights on its top. Coming to the end Simra had colonised, she stopped.

The surface was strewn. A homelike mess that had grown up round him in the half-handful of hours since he’d arrived. The slat-bound copy of ‘Breathing Water, and Other Essays’, closed and with a fired earth teacup atop it, keeping it that way. The flap-and-drawstring waterproofed bookbag, half-spilling its contents of scrolls and paperscraps onto the tabletop. A plate that had once borne a dour sweet blackpaste pastry, now scoured meticulous of even its crumbs. A bundled ragged scarf of faded patchwork colours. An inkstone in its stained carved bone box. Wetting brush, notebook, a pair of pens. A half-empty cup of local sourplum shein. In refuse, Simra had marked his territory.

“…Light, ser?”

Simra glanced at the basket of clay lamps and wicks, and the oil-kettle the server carried. Nix-wax, yellow-scented and acrid — he could smell it from the lamps already lit. His nose wrinkled.

“Thank you, no. Wouldn’t decline another cup though…” Simra fished three loose shils from his change-purse and set them on the tabletop. Dark lead and red-crusted iron, a hole punched through the center of every one.

The server hooked both basket and kettle over one arm. Nodding, she took the coins and bustled away.

Off-duty soldiers packed the table’s far end. The sound of their drinking echoed quick and dull in the narrow commonroom. The server spoke to the bearded clubkeep behind the lamplit bar. Looking Simra’s way, the keep paid him a short bitter look — the same as he’d offered since Simra had checked so sudden out of a twin room, four days ago.

Excepting them, and the hidden workings of the kitchen, the cornerclub was empty. Simra was alone again. No full-fledged solitude, this – no time to put down roots – but a solace all the same. The sweet middle difference between loneliness and being alone. One rushes in and round you, closing like cold water til you’ve struggled too long and it makes you breathe what it’s made of. The other you fall back into, waiting, welcoming, sometimes warm.

It had been a long time. All over again the world had grown tight about the two of them, knotting in like a rabbit-snare. He’d felt it first on the edges of Old Ebonheart, and then again, in the tunnels beneath Bodram: the looming danger of gaining anything you could never stand to lose.

But being alone let Simra gather his thoughts. Pretend the worry wasn’t there. When he came out from the stormtunnels into the sun, his heart was still hard as rawhide, beating hard and fast as his nerves slowed their jangling… Here and now, he needed this. It gave him time to write. To love the flow of ink from his thoughts into something lasting. To hate the tug and catch of the paper he had to work with. A retreat from the edge of panic.

He’d left Tammunei and Noor to themselves, but in time he’d still return… His lip twitched. He closed his eyes. Rolled them back behind his lids til he felt them stop and strain. “Fuck it…”

“Ser?”

The server was back. Simra’s jaw tensed and his teeth clenched. Colour in his cheeks, he nodded to her, raising his eyebrows into something that might stand in for a smile. She poured his cup full of pale pink shein and moved to leave again.

“Wait,” Simra said, almost a snap. “Sorry, but…” He balmed his tone. “These windows — who makes them? They Bodram work, or d’you order them in?”

The server frowned. Simra looked at her face for a glance, then only pretended to look, staring past one cheek. An illusion of eyes meeting eyes. She was pug-nosed for an elf, low heavy lids to her pinkish eyes, but the broad band of freckles that spanned her face put him in mind of Tammunei…

She glanced up at the parchment windows. Her face seemed almost surprised to find them there.

“I can find out..?” she said.

“Be grateful if you did.”


	2. Chapter 2

“For eight, ser, I won’t go lower’n three.”

“Eight? Three? Lower?” Simra’s face twisted in frustration. “Listen. Just for a moment. I’ve reckoned it all out. Two-hundred-and-some pages? That’s fourteen gathers in octavo maybe. Fourteen skins scudded and stretched and dried and cut. Folded, bound, cut, covered. And I’m short on time. A fine blank book, made fast — that’s no small thing, I know that. Way I see it, you’ve got the right to name your price here.”

“Three yera’s what I named. I won’t go lower.”

Simra drew in and let go a long thin breath. “For eight, yes, but I don’t want eight — I want fourteen. Fifteen if you can stretch to it. I don’t want lower, I want better, and at three yera for an eight-gather octavo, you’ve got me fretting what you’d turn out.”

The parchmenter’s heavy mouth stiffened almost to a sneer. “‘What I’d turn out’..?” A cold echo.

“I only meant… I mean… S’clear these’re quality materials!” Simra hurried to say. “Knew that when I saw and that’s what got me asking myself ‘bout them, so I thought… Fine craftsmer like you? I don’t want you underselling your skills!”

The parchmenter made a guttural rattling sound, somewhere in the start of his throat. “Think you’ve made it clear what you think of my ‘skills’…”

“Listen—”

“—You listen. Mine’s simple work. Practical. I parch skins. I wax skins. Walls and windows, proofed against the weather. I don’t make books, and no coin from you will make me make books. Now…I can sell you seven skins. Edged. Three yera for ‘em — I won’t go lower.”

“You said eight!”

“And now I said seven, outlander, take or leave it.”

The next breath Simra took was longer, thinner, straining harder at the reins of his patience. “All this…” he began, tight and hard, gesturing around them. “And all you can spare is eight..? You’ve got a full workshop!”

Shelves on shelves lined one wall, stocked with rolled parchments, drawers of tools and pots of reagents. Across from it, the far and back walls were hedged with low workbenches. Above them, racks of skins hung from the ceiling, each pinioned four ways, parching as they stretched. The morning light spilt over it all from a long parchment window set into the roof. The sun that spilt through dyed the scene in shade and jaundice-yellow.

“And I’ve got all Bodram to work for before I start promising to outsiders. Seven’s what I can spare to you.”

So that was how it would go. Simra’s lip curled. His eyes locked firm with the craftsman’s, amber-red against red-brown clay. “Listen,” he said.

And he gathered his mind together, working it til its shape was right. A knotting tangling pattern, more felt than seen. It clotted in his chest. Prickled like danger on the back of his neck. The shape trembled in the air between his fingertips for only a moment, struggling, held in a haze of heatless heat and caged inside his gesture. Then Simra leaned in across the shop’s counter, hand darting out. The parchmenter flinched from what was almost a slap, but it came to lay soft and flat on his cheek.

The spell’s flow from Simra’s body wrenched like a pulled muscle. The breathless stinging gasp of losing more strength than he ought to spend. A crawl of white smoke rose from the bandages wound tight about his his right palm. Against his skin, the cloth felt singed. That was good. Something to focus on. His own hand, his own skin — Simra pulled himself back into himself with that thought, confused as his mind crashed into another’s and recoiled.

“Listen,” he repeated, dark and slow and molasses-sweet, like to a stupid child or a skittish pony. “Help me help you. I’m offering you more money than you hoped to make from me. Four yera for fifteen and you’d have my thanks. Think on that and tell me how it sounds.”

Simra’s eyes never left the craftsman’s, but the craftsman’s were glossed and elsewhere.

“Sounds…good?” The parchmenter mulled the word round his slack heavy mouth, tasting it. “Fair…” he decided.

“Fair’s fair,” Simra smiled, too wide and without warmth, too hard behind the eyes. “No need to wax them. Edged and rolled’ll do fine, thank you.”

The parchmenter nodded, then shook his head like a cat waking up from too long asleep. Simra’s heart clenched and dropped. Had the spell already slipped? He raised his eyebrows in a silent question, waiting for one strained stretched instant. But the parchmenter frowned, nodded again, and turned about to gather up the order.

Simra sighed, and fished the coin from his purses. Two looped leather cords strung with round pierced coins of tin, lead, and iron. A one yera piece of polished redware, and four more bulls of Imperial copper. Piece by piece, the pay clashed onto the counter. The counting ought to have helped, but Simra’s nerves still thrummed high and taut.

Outlander, he’d said. He’d treated Simra like a cur. Whatever came after was kinder by far than what part of Simra had wanted to do. A pale-blazing streak of violence, guttering in his eyes as he stared at the parchmenter’s back…

In time he turned back to Simra, wearing an idiot smile on his blunt face. Kinder this way, Simra thought as the craftsman handed over the long bundle of treated parchment. Kinder by far. The mindbreak charm would wear off with time. Broken thumbs heal harder.

Outside the sunlight was slanting shorter, moving towards midday. A wide pale sky scarred with pale brittle clouds.

The parchmenter’s workshop lurked on the outskirts of Bodram, where the living town met the still-dead city that waited silent around it. A sourness hung in the nearby air. Wet hides on outdoor racks and washing pits for their liming. The pickled scent of halted decay, trapped between freshness and rot. Here at least, a ways from the town-proper, it would bother no-one but the parchmenter’s customers. No further reason to be among them anymore — Simra was glad of that.

He put it all to his back, but the smell followed, chasing him on the breeze. “Fuck you and the wind you rode in on…” Simra muttered, cursing the reek as he walked. True tanneries at least would have reeked of home: the piss and flesh stench of Crucible, the neighbourhood that crowned the Grey Quarter. Instead, the parchment-maker’s scent was subtler, and stranded his thoughts in the workshop, where they lingered on, lingering, lingering on…

The roll of skins were bundled long against his shoulder. No matter how he carried the scrolled up shape, it found a way to rub. It bothered his patience, or stirred up pain. Now against the faded silver scar of the arrow-wound near his neck, where the muscle still knotted sometimes, remembering Weeping-Cloud Hall. Now against the awkward slope of his bony shoulders.

Worse was the way it grit in his mind. Here was a booksworth of pages – a thing he’d hoped to bear with him for a good long while – and already he hated carrying it. His jaw set grim at the idea, trying not to make an omen of it. But it proved difficult. To tell it true, the longer he dwelt on what he’d bought, the more cheated he felt by it all.

The cloth bag of supplies he’d bought was little better. Hooked over his forearm, it cut into the muscle til the whole limb felt blue and dim from the elbow down. At least what it held suppressed simpler needs. Essential things, bought hard at good prices. Think on that instead, he told himself. So he did. Or he tried.

Away from the riverside, Simra shambled further from the living part of Bodram. Across the water, a short reach of valley eddied with dust and rippling scrub. A slow drift of shapes shoaled over the landscape: a herd of squat barrel-bodied guar the size of hogs, at forage on the brief rough plain. Ahead, the city ruins closed in.

If all of Bodram had been built of wood, it would have burnt. Perhaps then its leavings might have been less eerie. But the Hlaalu built often in brick and earthen plaster, and most of the city’s structures still stood. Rubble and cinders would show destruction. The empty adobes and scorched walls, gnawed but not felled by wind and rain, showed only disuse and decay. And perhaps in its way that was sadder.

In Simra’s path was one of the few walls that had fallen. Flame had chewed the plaster, and baked cracks in the structure, but he reckoned it was seasons of rain that did the worst of it. Built of mud it returned to mud, and had long since set solid once more. Now it looked like some body-swelled burial mound, rising from the ruins around it to half-swallow the uncollapsed rest of the building.

Simra clambered up one steep sudden side. Sat with a huff. He was tired. The spell had wrenched more from him than he’d reckoned and left him all but emptied out. But then again it always did. It and all new magic.

Always with him, any new kind of casting came slow. Boiled down to its bones, the issue was a struggle between sections of himself. On one side fought the inturned hate held for his own clumsiness, urging him to give up before he’d begun. The part that whispered how there can be no failure where there’s no attempt. Against it fought a slower-burning more stubborn hate for the whole idea of staying stupid. Two kinds of clumsiness, grappling clumsy.

But this was a spell he scarce let himself practice. Sometimes it was for the guilt. The invasion of it. Working an unwilling will til it buckled and went soft. More often though, it was for the lingering confusion its casting left behind. The fear that came with it, of failing, or struggling past his own strength.

“You’re no mage, you just do magic,” he muttered, voice dry and quiet. “No scholar that’s for-fucking-certain. Need a reminder, Sim? Here’s your fucking reminder…”

At least in the sun his strength was returning. Like slow rain fills a bowl left under the sky. Like drinking, and drinking, feeling warmth in the humming alcohol, then realising in a sudden flush that he was already drunk. Under the light and in the open air, Simra’s magicka came back slow. Clarity lagged behind. Simra slipped a coral pink sliver of dried guljana root into his mouth and began to chew. That helped.

Getting up, he walked the long way through the ruins, to better renew what he’d lost. It would be underground afterwards, and no sun down there to be found.

The way in wasn’t half so long as the first time, thanks be. Bodram had any number of ways into the stormtunnels beneath it, Simra had found. The trick was in finding the right entrance, and not walking in circles after. And here as much as in the Pale-Shod warrens beneath the Grey Quarter, his memory served him well.

Simra stooped under a low hidden archway and into a hooded stairwell. A few steps and it crooked back on itself, and stopped at a hardwood door, flush to the tunnel’s sides and ceiling. The dark wood was plain but prickled with magic. Beyond, the whole tunnel crawled with it. The distinct reptile weight of Noor’s magic, warm and numb, like the first trick-welcome heat that comes before frostbite.

Tammunei had given him something for it. Simra searched for the right pocket in his jacket, and brought it out. A smooth black river-pebble, wet-thick to the touch, even when dry, like it remembered the blood he’d seen Tammunei wash it in. A strange kind of key, for guest-glyphs far stronger and more suspicious than Simra’s mother had ever made. Held tight in his palm, he walked through the open door and into the waiting dark.

A feeling clotted round him. Like sinking through water without getting wet. A breaking meniscus. It rippled as he went, swallowing him further. Six paces, turn left, a dozen steps. He stumbled down by touch, hand to the wall. Fifteen paces, counting down, and still no light allowed til they were done.

And then they were.

As he cupped his hands and whispered a magelight to life, Simra swore he felt the darkness purr around him. A shudder of terror. He looked over his shoulder, jerking about, feeling watched, then scolded himself. Of course he was being watched. Like a spider in her web, she felt every part of this place. But that only stays a comfort so long as she’s a friend, Simra thought.


	3. Chapter 3

Every culture has tales of witches. Or so it seemed to Simra, reckoning by all the peoples he’d gone among. The Dunmer had their mabrigash, their punarigash: cautionary fables and moralising parables. But in Skyrim, the Eastmarchers had tales of their own. Witches who ate flesh, and lived in cottages made from the bones of fish and birds. In the main they were bugbears — shadows to scare children into heeding their parents. Such stories always are, in part. But for Simra it was their magic, and the places they made their homes in, that stuck in the craw of his mind.

They built their houses from the leavings of growing flittish things – bones and feathers from birds and trout; roofs thatched with woven hair – so their homes too could be flighty. Never in one place nor another. Everywhere if you knew the way to find them. Nowhere at all if you didn’t.

Perhaps they moved. In some stories, they had legs at each corner and strutted like pheasants from place to place. In others they were lodges, dug-outs, that burrowed like badgers, eaten by the earth, then spat out somewhere else. In the folktales that was the way, often as not. But sometimes a story surfaced that had the itch of real magic and once-true rumour about it, and in them the houses never shifted location. Small pockets of warped place, they sat liminal between everywhere and nowhere. Only the paths that led to them changed.

Standing in the round chamber where first they’d found Noor, Simra wondered if she had worked some similar magic here. There was a strange convenience to the maze beneath Bodram that stripped beyond logic’s limits. Whichever way Simra entered or left, his journey passed through this place. Underground and away from the sun, with no compass but memory for guidance, it would be easy to get lost. But he never did, no matter how aimless he wandered. Perhaps the tunnels themselves led the way, always to this crossroads, and quicker every time.

It was a kind of atrium, tunnels spiralling off from its center like crooked spokes from a crooked wheel, eight in total. Lit red by his cantrip’s cold glow, Simra stood and scanned the doorways.

Some were marked with chalk on their frames or inside walls. The hand-sized symbols weren’t letters in any language he knew. Nor were they pictures of anything souled or still that he could make out. In every hash of lines and whorling dots, there were echoes of the harrow- and clan-marks ashlanders wore. Traces of those that stood out in flat pale silver on Simra’s face, or as proud-raised weals on Tammunei or Noor’s. But torn from their context and scratched featureless onto blank-faced stone, these marks were bleak and abstract — opaque and silent, straining the eye that stared too long.

Perhaps they were part of the magic worked into the stones of this place. Like stays and struts to the enchantment’s strange architecture. Or perhaps there was no magic at all and they were nothing but aids to memory. Simra knew what one of them meant, and that was all he’d needed. In the quiet of his mind, he hoped they wouldn’t stay long enough that he’d need to learn any more.

The tunnel tapered, narrowing til Simra’s head bowed and his shoulders stooped. The long bundle of parchment scraped against the ceiling while his scalp escaped the same. But the way carried on only long enough to corner out from view of the atrium. Then it opened wide, yawning into the heart of Noor’s labyrinth.

It was wide and barrel-ceilinged, an irregular inkblot of a chamber, larger than the warren where Simra had grown up, and combing off into more rooms and alcoves besides. Strange beyond the strangeness of it being here at all was its emptiness. Gutted of its purpose if ever it had one, now the chamber contained nothing but what Noor had brought to it. A nook where a heap of rags and imported pelts sat piled, more like a nest than a bed. A threadbare rug where tools of bone and weird-smooth wood were laid in loving disarray. A cluster of sacks and saddlebags, leather straps that might have been reins…

Simra’s own bedroll stretched out near one wall, his kettle and gathersack next to it.

Just off from the room’s middle, Tammunei and their sister sat, slumped and muttering, looking up as Simra came.

“Blessings,” he greeted them, dropping the blighted bundle next to his bedroll. He’d set to work on it later. For now he was glad to be rid of its weight and wear on his mind.

“And on you,” Tammunei said, formal as ever in greetings and goodbyes. “What news of the world you’ve been walking?”

Simra gave a small snort in place of smiling. He liked this game. Liked the sharing of stories as a guest-gift, taking his time with the trading of news. Liked the way the old question took on rhythm, like expectance made an incantation of it. He even liked the sharp reminder of his father, who kept to these old rites too.

“They’re selling glue in the marketplace. Reckon you could smell it from across the river. It’s a wonder anyone had any appetite to buy food in amongst all that. A fucking miasma.” A good word, that. Simra’s lips parted crooked in a late-blooming smile. “Might be that helped the prices I got. Might be everything’s cheap in the middle-of-fucking-nowhere, except anything anyone’d actually want. Either way…”

Tammunei blinked twice, staring at Simra in the sidelong way they had. First the good eye, then the bad, then both open and looking again. Owlish, Simra thought. Wide and round and open. That meant nerves, he knew — needs and urging and urgency. A question they wouldn’t quite voice.

Simra stepped forward and slipped the rough cloth bag from off his arm. “Tramaroot, bones for broth, dried meat, sugar… Like you asked.”

The flat straight bridge of Tammunei’s nose wrinkled. The lids of their eyes hooded a little as they squinted over at the bundle Simra had already dropped by his bedroll. Another unvoiced question. “Thank you,” they said, in their napped and dusty voice.

“She still need time?” Simra nodded at Noor.

She barely moved except sometimes to shiver. Both she and Tammunei were huddled near a low small cairn of flat stones. The air around the cairn shuddered with lingering heat, and Tammunei had done their best to trap her between them and the heat of their own body, hugged flush against her. For all that, and for the ragged summer-weight robe she wore, she still seemed half-dead with cold.

“Guessing this isn’t a thing one bowl of soup’ll fix,” said Simra.

“Several bowls maybe,” said Tammunei, flat and earnest. “But too much too soon will do her more harm than good. Trama and bones. Meat for long strength, sugar for short. But the real remedy will be patience…”

“Mmh,” Simra murmured, nodding. He’d seen this before in the Quarter, in long hard Winters where no food came downtown. Starvation bites like a mad dog, and needs slow persuasion to loose its jaws. Tooth by tooth and slowly. Too much too soon could be fatal… But he was impatient. He wished it were otherwise.

Tammunei foraged through the bag while Simra went to the rug of tools to bring out the one thing of metal among them. A round-bellied soup kettle of black wrought iron. His help at least might speed things, if only by moments or hours. So he helped, bringing back the kettle and filling it from their waterskins, then setting it beside Tammunei. In time he set himself down too, crouching on his heels and haunches.

“Fire?” he asked.

“Please.”

Simra bowed his head, closed his eyes, steadied himself with a sigh.

“Call the flame by song, or call it up by dance… Where it always starts is here.”

Without lifting her head, Noor reached out a hand, pressing a finger to Simra’s chest. It clinked against pendants and beads through his shirt, never making it down to the skin. Still he stiffened, staring down at the touch. The skin, dry and thin as birch-bark. The wrist, skinny as a shaved cat where it dared out from her robe. His mouth set into a grimace.

“Breathing,” she said in her dead leaf voice. “Firecalling starts with the breath.”

“Don’t,” Simra muttered. He wanted to swat the hand away. Tell her if she knew so much about calling fire she could heat her own blighted rockstove. But he knew full well she lacked the strength now, and refusing his part would only slow them down. “I know,” he said, gentle as he could.

Gathering himself, feeling the ground beneath his feet and the air between his fingers, Simra took the same breath as before. It shook, prickling in his throat like a point to be proven. A goad — that helped. Like a healer he laid hands on the stones – one bare and one half-bandaged – and spat the words of a calling.

There was a rise of sparks, like a swarm of torchbugs all taking wing at once. A flush of warm dry scent and whispering sound. Simra’s fingers twitched against the heat, but drew back from it only a little. He barely felt the burn anymore for all the times he’d burnt them. Scars and callouses; skin printless smooth at his fingertips. The next calling-word asked the flame to stay, and the force of holding it eased. The rush became a gentle flow, from his belly, his heart, his breath and his hands, in waves of fat-flanked flames that lapped over and laid on the stones. Soon they glowed pink.

“Enough?” Simra asked.

Tammunei placed the pot atop them in answer. The marrowbones followed, into the water as it came to a simmer.

“No song or dance needed,” Simra smirked.

Noor gave a wooden creak of laughter that died off, weak, before it could start. “Naturally,” she said, breathless.

Was that meant to be a slight? Some curt push of ostracism? No matter if it was or wasn’t. Simra knew himself, and what he could do. Whether she saw that in such a showless display meant nothing. Or at least it meant almost nothing. So why did it still lodge itself like an insult, hard in the ribs of his side?

Simra took the chance to look over the pot-mouth. Shuffling inches closer to its heat, he stole a glance at Noor. Sister, Tammunei had said. Though they only shared a mother, she showed in both their features. The broad full cheekbones and hood-lidded eyes, turned down at each inner corner. The thick snarl of hair, though Noor’s was a mousy grey-streaked brown and tangled nestlike with neglect. It parted in the middle and fell waist-long, while Tammunei’s showed bright like blood fresh-fallen on snow, half pulled back into a jagged bun and braided near their ears. Both shared the same agelessness too, going graceful down the years as some mer did. But Tammunei wore theirs as a strange sidestep, trapped somewhere parallel to youth but no longer in its grip. Noor seemed ancient, though not truly old — beyond age, not beside youth.

With a use-knife, slow and careful, Tammunei began to slice trama into the pot. Simra unfolded a wedge-bladed straight-razor from a jacket pocket and shaved slivers from the cake of set black marshmerrow sugar, watching as they fell into the burbling water.

“How much is enough?”

“More than that,” said Tammunei. “I’ll tell you when.”

By the time the tell came, nothing was left of the sugar but a brief black spike. Simra pocketed it into the same scrap of silk where he kept his other cake of the stuff, and slipped both into his satchel.

The broth was rich with marrow, trama-bitter and merrow-sweet. Spice might have made a fine thing of it, but better the blandness than throw off the subtle alchemy Tammunei had stirred into it. And besides, Bodram was a backwater, and Sadras territory to boot — no spices but garlic and gall to be had.

The sugar alone was enough to set the two Velothi to grimacing as they ate.

Simra hid a smirk behind his bowl as he drank the dregs from its belly. Outlander, he thought to himself, in smug satisfaction. What was medicine to them, to him tasted much like a meal…


	4. Chapter 4

_Bodram is also where this story begins, and where it ends, and begins again. Make of that what you will — you’ll make better sense of my riddling as you read, I’m sure. But before I go on, and start to push the puzzle-pieces together, there are customs to be tended. And at the very least I owe them lip-service._

_It’s customary, in some books, for the one speaking to introduce themselves. Or else to introduce their story. The author lays out their sources. The prime actor is put forward. The essayist empties out their gatherbag of parts and pieces, looks to the reader, and points to a theme that unites them._

_For my part, I’m a little of all the above. Author, character, record-keeper. Opiner of opinions. My own unauthorised biographer. And perhaps for how I’m tugged and shared between these things, I come out as nothing at all. No one thing in whole and total, but many when taken for the sum of my parts. A whole and actual person, with a life leading breadcrumb-trail back to my birth — a future, I hope, leading forth._

_That’s a lengthy way to say something keen and steely-simple. That I’m a common enough person much like you. Except in the ways that there is no-one like me, or ever was, or will be._

_My name is Simra Hishkari._

_My father was Zainab, of the Mabudani clan. My mother too was Zainab, though of what clan I’ve never been told. I use ‘was’ not because they have since joined their ancestors. Both my parents are yet alive but have since stopped being Velothi. A little they lost by choice; a little in time was taken. Like so many others in the wake of the Red Year, fate flocked them westward, and they settled in Windhelm’s Grey Quarter. There stone and snow leeched their homeland from them, until they sold what made them ashlanders to buy what shreds of tolerance the Nords would stoop to sell them. In the Quarter they birthed my sister and I, and raised us as Dunmer of Skyrim._

_They named my sister Soraya. ‘The Triumph That Comes After Long Trial.’ She was their victory, prised from the Grey Quarter’s greedy jaws. Victory after a long and trying labour. After sorrow, starvation, a stillbirth, and all in a strange city, and all in a strange cold land. They gave her a name that meant endurance and overcoming, adversity be damned._

_My name is only sounds. No meaning in my mothertongue, or in any of its cousins I know of. But the curse-blessing of inheriting an emptiness is to choose the way you fill it. I’ve gone by other names. I’ve had my reasons. They broke my history into pieces and scattered them like seed-grain in fallow places, forgotten. This book will bring them together. I aim to see how much, in time, my true name can contain._

_So — I am a patchwork of pieces. A person. More fragmented than even the worst kind of fiction, but still kept whole by the truth. For everything this book contains is fact, excepting the parts that aren’t. Rumour and legend and things I can’t know will all in all have their own say. But know in the main that I am a liar, writing this book to tell out the truth._

_There. You have your pieces, and a picture of who I am. Keep it like a bookmark as you go from page to page. Cling to it as I change from this first custom and onto another: choosing for my beginning another matter’s middle._

_In Winter we forded the river._

_Guar for the saddle and pack both paddling, heavy-buoyant heads above the water. The riders on their shoulders stood up high in their stirrups. Plainsfolk past their flesh and through to bone, there are few swimmers amongst the Vereansu, but plenty among their herds. With the breath from their lungs they filled bladders and bags of leather, puffing them up like bull-netch to float over what couldn’t be carried._

_The pilgrims and settlers fared worse. Their way had been roads and trails in the main, cart-wheels trundling on in the ruts of those that went before._

_The layfolk fought on the backmost bank in view of their carts, arguing what they ought to take and what they could never leave behind._

_One family wolfed what supplies they couldn’t bring. Tried for a layer of fat at least, rather than lose their goods wholesale. Clever as they hurried down bowls of saltrice porridge, and yams kept dry in casks of salted sandclay, and hunks from their haunches of salt-cured meat. Foolish as one among them cramped in the swimming and lost out to the current, sweeping downriver to their parents’ cries._

_All among them left more than they’d have wished, but some lost more than others._

_Waste, I thought, staring back at their wagons from the far bank. Full, well stocked and wasted now. I shivered, mood-foul. Called flickers of fuel-starved fire to keep awake and warm against the chill._

_I’d hitched all my bags and jacket to my swordbelt, bound and tied and buckled secure. Gripped the scabbard at its tip as I waded and struggle-splashed across. Raising my bags like a standard, I held my world above the waters. The bank’s black mud was soft underfoot. Lead-heavy, spent with cold, so much of me longed to bed down there. Lie down, sleep, before my body remembered the cold. But waking up would be hard. Instead I paced, cursing, stamping my feet, swinging my arms. Strode my baggage up the bank and onto dry ground, then walked circles in the long and grey-green grass. Agony as my blood unfroze. A gushing headrushing heat as I refused the cold and the wet._

_And calling splashes and snarls of flame, scorching steam from my sodden clothes, I looked back on the bank we’d left. I looked back the way towards Bodram, and looked back at the things lost for leaving, and thought: Waste._

_A fording’s a chancy thing any time it’s undertaken, but in Evening Star it’s as good as dicing with illness and death when every player at the table has loaded bones but you. Damplung, Chills, Deadbone, Gravedigger’s Song — perhaps they hide in water, or crowd in to crawl on cold skin, but they stalk river fords in Winter, and flock down to feast like crows. We would be no different. Were no different. Four we lost to illness in the week that followed. I wonder if we crossed what waters came after for any cause but spite._

_Spite can only take so much credit for spurring me on through the days yet to come. Most among us were driven by fear. Of what we’d left behind us, or of what would become of them if they were left behind. And in my way I was little different. But for Tammunei and the ones they’d shaped to fanatics, they sailed on in a strange and kenless calm._

_They followed Tammunei’s example in taking it on. Faces masked flat in faceless cold. Speech saved til work emerged that only words could do — or saved and saved and never spent at all. Carrying next to nothing. Eating and sleeping in a short repeating ritual of absent joyless need. But Tammunei had worn it long before them. The wisewoman Tammunei who’d saved us at Bodram — it hung in their red hair like perfume, subtle sometimes, but always there._

_With Tammunei, I thought at first it was necessity. Inevitability. Duty. It made them focused and fearless. And seeing that, it was fear that made me follow. Fearing for Tammunei, who seemed of a sudden not to fear death. I feared for them. Someone had to._

_When our caravan was trapped and shattered in Bodram. When Vereansu arrows tore our guards and charges to tatters as they came, springing the trap they’d set in Bodram. When we fled through Bodram, Tammunei and I, and then they stopped me running, and said we would run no longer._

_“Safe,” I said._

_And they shook their head. “No. We’re not. I can hear, can’t you? We’re dying. Still dying.”_

_“No. Not us, only them. Not you and not me — not if we wait. Not if we run.”_

_“To wait like waiting for a storm to be over, then running in the calm from the wreckage? No. Could you live with yourself, knowing? After that?”_

_I’d lived with as much and could live with worse. I knew it. Screams and butchery above our heads as we hid beneath the streets, in the city’s stormtunnels. And I could still leave it behind. Living with guilt is still living, and sometimes surviving is all you can do. But we’d both bound each other up – teeth sink and grip tight – and neither would let go. I wouldn’t let Tammunei die, so instead I let them save us all._

_I know now Tammunei was scared as I was. I know now that death was exactly what they feared. But where I feared dying, and the hungry nothing that waited for me after, Tammunei feared the dead. The sobbing restless ghosts that died that day, and would hound after Tammunei, mad to be heard, forever if we ran. The rat-king knot and mess of rage and pain that Bodram would continue to be if we ran. The chain of ancestors that, slow, would crush their soul for shame. Fear._

_There was duty, yes, but duty’s only words and meaning well where failure has no fear in it — no rod, no whip, no scourge. Duty is only another kind of fear, or else it’s nothing at all. But when what followed spat on that duty to the dead for the sake of the living, who’s to say what Tammunei did was not just pure compassion? Bravery? And all done in spite of duty._

_Bravery, then. Kindness, then. Sacrilege, sin, and all-but-all-spending effort, for the sake of others. You’ll hear no counterclaim from me. Martyrdom might be the right word, in all ways save that Tammunei survived. But only in pieces. The spell they wove was more than ever I’d seen anyone cast, and more than I ever have since. And it burnt them down, leaf and branch and stem, down to the root._

_No speech, no hearing, no feeling. A sleepwalker with memories in tatters. The others – the saved – looked on it like some glowing glamour. All the grave strange worldlessness you’d expect from a storybook prophet. Some resolute new Veloth, come to guide them again to Vvardenfell. They followed that. Whereas once again, I followed for fear. Tammunei had broken themself. I carried on after, picking up what fragments fell, and hoping in time they’d be fixed._

_So when Tammunei forded that first river of our journey, they did it without feeling the cold. A strong swimmer, sleek as an otter._

_But it was me had to warm them, rubbing life back into their waxen limbs, and setting fires to sweat out the sickness that would otherwise creep in._

_And it was me had to feed them as they forgot to eat._

_And it was me had to speak for them, as their tongue lay still and stolen._

_“We stop here!” I called out above the wailing valley wind. “Now! No going on til we can all go on. Rest up, get dry, get warm, or I swear the cold will claim you.”_

_What I meant was to wait for Tammunei, who had no way of knowing their body could not go on. As in Bodram, so beyond it — I would’ve left the others and lived on feeling nothing, but could not leave Tammu behind. Not yet._


	5. Chapter 5

Searing closed. A chafe at the wrist. Grip round, flesh against flesh. Fingernails half-moon his skin. Struggle? Blight it all and void take all you are, at least try, the least you can do is try. He tries but he’s already broken. Heels scuff the dirt, fighting through and past the fight’s true end. All over.

Plead and beg? A hand in his hair and head pulled back. Throat exposed then throat closed. Plead. Beg. Here’s where it got you.

Please don’t, please don’t. A creak and grind where his ribs are broken as he raises his voice. Money? My weapons, my clothes, my word? Serve you, kiss your boots, whatever you want. No. No no no! Or just one. Have pity. Two? Or the other one! Anything — just don’t — just don’t —

There comes a point with pain where it comes round so far as to choke itself. A closed circle and a suffering body trapped inside. And after that flash of agony – a first world-blinding taste – all that’s left is shock. No pain at all, but no mercy in its absence.

Simra woke in its grips again. A blazing white blanket, shrouded round him, tight as tight and no give to worm free — like the Riftfolk wrap their dead when they give them to the sky. The white turned blue. Locked inside himself, he had no breath to scream. And then again it passed. Like it always passed. Like it never seemed it would.

Sweat stung his skin. Hard to tell now what he was blinking back — if the salt-soreness at the corners of his eyes was cold sweat or hot tears. It didn’t matter, he told himself. He was in a darkness, he told himself, while the deed and the dream had been in daylight. He was tangled in his bedroll, the fur and fabric muddled in knots from the kick and thrash of his feet. It didn’t matter. And the pain was only ghost-pain, left from things gone by. That he’d fixed – or tried to fix – and survived.

Still here. Still here. His heartbeat slowed. Still here, for whatever small and snide consolation that was.

The pain let go, leaving Simra in his body. Factual, actual — the only hurt left was real. Minor. Small and bitter tattoos, invisible all on the length of his body. Like every sleeping scar of a sudden had come awake again.

Dividing past from present, and scars from new soreness, Simra counted them. Sometimes counting helped.

Four dull and piercing things, pricked on his palm’s rough belly. His fingernails did that, hand against hand with the seizing ache in his knuckles. A jarring stiffness in all the workings of his right hand, line by line and tight in his tendons. Last of all was the crick in his neck and shoulders, knotted wooden from sleeping on too hard a floor.

No, not a floor, came a smug reminder from somewhere inside him. A deck.

Simra fought free of his bedroll and into the darkened cabin. The ceiling was cramped down low and the walls were slanting, narrow. The trap he’d dreamt himself into had been worse, but this only echoed it. Get out. He had to get out. Like waves the last had receded, but its waning strength only shared into the next one. A new wave of panic.

“No no no no no…”

He rested on his knees a moment, breathing, eyes shut tight. Hung his head and knuckled his eyes til purple-blue lights blossomed into the blackness. A thing to focus on. He felt the pose open him up — the knotted muscles in his neck and upper back. And that was good. But sweat had turned his hair to yarn – disgusting – and it stuck to his cheeks and eyelids, his jaw and throat. He brushed it back, gasping in a thin breath. His hands were still shaking, unsteady, and he cursed them in a snarling whimpering whisper:

“Grow some fucking bones.” Words in the Grey Quarter patois he still thought in, dreamt in, and spoke in when he spoke to himself. “Pitiful. You’re mended. You lived. So I fucking swear by bones and blood, if you keep acting like you’re still fucking broken…”

He took a long breath. Steady on the inhale, but the outhale shuddered. It was enough. It was good enough. It was a start. Rolling his neck on his shoulders, twisting the column of his neck til it clicked, and clicked, uncricking, Simra remembered he wasn’t alone. Almost started talking to himself again – idiot, in here when anyone could hear; Noor; the fucking boatmer – but turned the words to a short and pitying laugh.

Out, he told himself. He had to get out. The thought this time was a calmer one. He felt his way to the cabin’s low kennel of a doorway and crawled through.

By night the boat’s fan-sail was furled and the mast taken down. The long shallow hull drifted slow. The boatmer’s black-haired daughter sat asleep at the stern with the one great oar cradled in her arms. Though asleep perhaps wasn’t the word for it. Magic maybe, or some strange training of the mind, but she and her father had some way of keeping the boat on-course, even while they slept — or else slipped into this trance of theirs that let them rest and work, both at once. She steered while the riverflow carried them.

Here the dark was softer, its hold more fragile beneath a sky shared full of stars. Red shouts of colour and blue antumbra strayed through the night overhead, aglow with starlight. Constellations and scattered strays of light, named and nameless mingled in the bright-filled black.

But close to the ground the world narrowed down. A dim ring of muddy grey light from the bug-lamps hung at prow and stern. Jars where living things flitted and fought, dashing dumb their hopes over and over against the crude glass that kept them. Shimmering half-reflections on the water round the boat, but after that, nothing. No banks to be seen. Just the black and blocked off sections of sky where Simra reckoned there ought still to be mountains.

The boat itself stank ripe with the things that lived in water. Simra’s face crumpled coming out into the reek. Something fishy and lingering from the basket where the boatmer kept bait. Another covered basket Simra knew was full of shells, cracked open and wrenched from the hand-long waterlice they caught and ate as they went. Grey-white flesh; blue-black shells. They tasted good enough when fresh and simmered for soup, but the shells smelt awful only hours later. Kept for profit somewhere down the line, Simra supposed. Sold to be made into chitin or resin. That must be it, or else where was the blighted point?

“Already paying seven fucking yera for sixty-some fucking leagues,” Simra muttered, voice thick. “Think they wouldn’t need to…”

Smell aside, the sky might have been soothing. The sky, the river’s slow amble, the open air and Sun’s Dusk chill. The chance to feel alone, and remember where he was. When he was. And that all the rest was in the past, or else was kept for dreaming. It ought to have been easy.

Making himself shrug, Simra pulled his sister’s jacket around himself against the stubborn cold. Coming on year’s end, and again he wasn’t dressed for it. Of layers he had plenty – could wear them all at once as he’d done through five Winters already – but by now he ought to have bought or taken a coat.

“Son of skyrim…” he muttered in monotone. “Tscht! Y’oughtta know better. But when’ve you ever?”

He kissed his teeth. Sometimes the talking helped too. Words were good for that. Taking up most of his mind so nothing else could find room to echo. Not that they’d help him back to sleep, but he doubted now anything would. With or without, he was tired these days. Knew the rhythm of this by now. Besieged by the grey, and with nothing to do but wait. No strength to be found save in stubbornness.

He stayed up. Waited and longed for the dawn. And in time he watched it break, red heart and hems of gold, before the boat’s blunt prow as the river Balda washed them East. There was a metaphor in that. A poem maybe. A bad one.

The others came out in time, much as he dreaded them.

Tammunei first. Like a burrowing things feels the moonrise even from underground, they came out from the cabin and onto the deck in time with the dawning sun.

Their hair was in red disarray, long down their back and wild by nature, but pulled and tugged hopeless to heel. A jagged bun behind their head; new-made braids hanging down, but already beginning to fray.

The long angles of Tammunei’s eyes narrowed to a bleary squint. They turned their head, bird-quick, to look at Simra with their good eye til a frown formed on their face. Tammunei treated silence like a third speaker in any conversation. Handled it with hands more careful than their own clumsy fingers ever were. They waited for the silence to finish its turn, then at last, thick-voiced, they spoke:

“Did you sleep?”

Simra raised a hand, flat, to make a vague gesture. The other mer only bit their lip, not understanding. Simra couldn’t blame them…

“A little,” he said. “Not a lot.”

Words to himself came easy enough. Scathing ones easier than most. This morning, words to others were harder.

“Not well, I don’t think.” Tammunei pursed their lips, full mouth fuller for a small mulled moment. “Chewed up and spat out — that’s what you say, isn’t it? When someone looks worn?”

Not what Simra said. Someone else. It was something borrowed. Moridene. He’d seen her again any number of times since last he’d seen her, but only in dreams and reveries. Falling, or crying out, fighting the same people trying to heal her…

Simra nodded. Tammunei knew what that meant, at least. “Get some fresh air and strong tea in me, I’ll be fine enough.” His nose wrinkled, noting the smell again. “Rejuvenated…”

The banks of the river by now had risen out of the dark. The mountains of Stonefalls ridged up in the leftmost distance. Simra sniffed, seeing their tops were already frosted white. All the rest was swathes of grass and struggling patchy scrub; highlands shading down into plains.

Floodplains soon, Simra remembered. The way to Old Ebonheart was mud and bog, for leagues on leagues on leagues. Pools of brack or veins of clay. Strange spits and inlets of seawater, lost on its way back from high tide, like islands on the inverse — scraps of ocean in an ocean of land.

He’d hated it then, years ago. Ruined his boots; rusted his sword til it stuck all but solid in its sheathe. A thunderstruck taste in every thick gulp of air. He’d hate it all the worse now, he reckoned. Small mercy that their path led a different way. There are other roads to Vvardenfell than over Scathing Bay. Even if this was not the one he’d choose…

They’d squabbled the route no end back in Bodram. Back when Simra still had some squabble-strength in him. He and Noor and Tammunei — each had tried to pull the path their own way.

Noor wanted sky and wind and breeze-licked grasslands. The mountains troubled her. The Sadras troubled her. Towns, she said, and walls, and bread, and shame boxed in by darkness — she’d had enough of those. Grown weak on them, she said. Better they travel by strength all their own than be floated overwater like cargo, spoiling with every passing day.

But of strength she still had little enough. Would need longer rest to recover it. She’d all but drowned herself in the flow of ghosts she’d joined together. Starved herself by distraction, down in the maze she made Wasted muscles and hollow cheeks.

Tammunei was easier to please. All they wanted was to stay far from Scathing Bay, where Vivec once had been. Where they must have tried to cross before, and must have been turned back. All that death, Simra supposed. If Bodram howled like it had in Tammunei’s mind, what would so large a city do? So many lives blinking out at once…

Simra would’ve sooner hired onto a boat upriver. High and Low Silgrad, buying parchment on the way – a coat maybe – then trekking the path to Veranistown and on by boat to Balmora. Expensive, yes, but it suited his purposes. Left open a scant skinny chance… And like Tammunei, he couldn’t face the land-bridge. Scathing Bay didn’t trouble him, but what came before..? He couldn’t go back. Not to Old Ebonheart.

Noor got her way. By then the grey had set in, and stolen most of Simra’s will to object. It was Tammunei convinced her that a downriver boat would see them on the plains faster. In truth, Simra reckoned it had been one of Tammunei’s rare flickers of guile — making sure their sister had longer to rest before the time came to walk.

Deshaan, then. An east-tending arc through its northern plains, once the river forked and they left the boat. A long way around and torture by foot. Simra knew that, but his tongue wouldn’t form the words.

“Fine enough for what?”

“…Mmh?”

“What will you be fine enough for? After you’ve had tea and fresh air?”

“Oh…”

Simra frowned. Tammunei had broken him out of his thoughts. Snatched a hole in his silence. Times were that would’ve brought a prickle of irritation. He might have snapped back, in the mornings most of all. Now the answer caught in his throat: nothing.

He sighed. Forced a smile onto his face. “Anything, I reckon. Within reason.”

Tammunei was easy to lie to, but not even they seemed to believe him now.

“You’ll be able to walk?” they asked.

“Fucking hope so…”

“There’ll be a lot of that, when we reach the fork.”

This time a streak of anger broke through. A brazen gleaming thing. “Never said it was a good idea, did I? Remember that when we’re halfway to nowhere and all the way from anywhere fucking else on – what? – our fifteenth con-fucking-secutive day of walking and a small voice in the back of your head pipes up and says ‘fuck this!’”

Tammunei didn’t flinch as Simra raised his voice. Still, they looked like they’d been struck — not a fresh blow, but a past raw and full of them. Already guilt ached in Simra’s gut.

“No,” Tammunei said, with painful patience, “but Noor did. And she knows the plains. She’s wise, and she’s Vereansu. So…”

“So trust in one who rode them. Half a lifetime in dreams, and half in my own skin.” Noor had crawled silent from out of the cabin too now, speaking Velothis. “The Deshaan Plains are in my blood, and my blood’s in them. My people’s bones lie at rest in their grasses.” She took a deep breath and let it go with relish before turning to Tammunei. “Zainab, is he?”

A week or more Noor had known him and still she spoke over him — about him, not to him.

“By blood,” he forced himself to cut in.

“Well…” she purred, voice gritting against itself as at last she looked at him. “Your blood ought to know that pull, then. Another plains people, the Zainab. Zainab, Vereansu — those’re names known by steppe and sky, Simra Hishkari. Perhaps Deshaan will do you good. Give you a taste of what you want. Perhaps not…”

Simra made himself smile and stay silent, deferring to the older mer. Already his anger had burnt itself out, leaving only bad blood behind. But inside his mind, cold and bitter, he cursed her. With Tammunei, the moment to say he was sorry had passed — washed away by her words. Her wisdom. And inside him the apology settled like a stone, unspoken.


	6. Chapter 6

The hamlet was on none of Simra’s maps, nor any map he could remember seeing. Not the faded and fingermarked Imperial Cartographic Society print; proud on the front two pages of his Third Era almanac; showing Morrowind as it had been. Not the dog-eared bundle of smaller scale charts he’d gathered down the years. ‘Stonefalls…Southern Deshaan…Narsis & City Limits…Ascadian Isles & Azura’s Coast…Holdings of the Mainland & Zafirbel Telvanni.’ The maps and sketches that showed Morrowind, piece by piece, as it was now.

It was easy to reckon out any number of reasons. Harder was choosing between two whys. Was the hamlet missed off from the maps because it was too new, or still too much of a nothing? The same story and the same questions shaded over any number of villages and outposts in Morrowind.

Half a handful of buildings in packed earth and brick, raised up on platforms from the riverfork’s damp. A handful more of wooden trellis and stretched hide, roofs and lintels blue-black and green with moss. Snagged plots of shortbeans and leafy watergreens grew in the damplogged dirt. And that was all. The people here were fisherfolk, or people waiting for their chance to leave.

Old women in tarred leather coracles floated the river’s broad splay, barb-spears poised to snatch up fish, or whatever else lived in the water. Skinny children wrestled and fixed nets on the far muddy bank. All of them were swaddled against the cold, despite the pale afternoon sun.

The boatmer scowled and fixed his mouth like there was a smell to this place more foul by far than his boat and its baskets. To Simra there was no difference. He’d be glad to put both to his back. Upwind if his luck ran kind, but when did it ever?

The boat passed at a distance, then shunted against the southernmost bank.

“That piece?”

The boatmer cornered Noor as she came outside from the cabin. His dialect was thick, murky and rural. Hard to understand for any of them. For Simra it wasn’t so much the words he used that were difficult. In themselves Simra knew most if not all. It was how he put them together into sentences. Put across his meaning — or didn’t.

“This piece, that piece,” he said, slow to Noor, as if she were simple. “This piece is gift ago. That piece is no. That piece is where? We together an agree.”

Simra strapped into his bags. Satchel, book-bag, gathersack. Swordbelt and the pouch that hung from it. No matter that he was the one who’d treated with the boatmer all this while. Arranged payment. Haggled a discount when he told the older mer he’d be more protection than passenger, showing him the sword he carried. The boatmer always spoke to Noor first when he had something to say. The eldest of them, Simra supposed. Determined by tradition.

“Isn’t this were you step in, usually?” Simra turned to the boatmer’s daughter. Her Dunmeris had a broader catch to it, grown by necessity like thorns from a fern — a short lifetime of translating for her father must’ve done that.

She wrinkled her pug-nose and spat, past the boat’s side and into the water. “Please.” When she looked back to Simra, she wore a small grin. “Will rescue when they stop being funny.”

Simra gave a rattling sigh in the back of his throat and crossed to the boat’s far side. The boatmer fixed him with another scowl. An interruption; torn decorum. But what was the use in caring now? This was as far as their paths went together.

“This piece, I’ve given you,” Simra said, jutting a thumb over his shoulder and into the past. “That piece…” He rummaged in the pouch at his swordbelt and hooked out three jangling strings of shils. That had been the deal: four then and three now. “Happy?”

“Happy,” the boatmer nodded. A look of sheepish discomfort in his face as he took the last three yera of his pay.

Simra raised his brows at Noor, a lean cut of smile crossing his face. Satisfaction, but only shortlived. It’d be sweeter to know he held the pursestrings of their venture if it didn’t mean opening his own purse so often. He’d paid their passage – she and Tammunei – and provisioned them this far. Tammunei, he knew, carried no money at all. Noor had shown no signs of being any different. At another kind of time, with another kind of head on his shoulders, Simra might have asked her.

Instead they flopped from the boat’s beached prow and onto the bank. Tammunei first, who helped Noor down. Then Simra, alone, with a leap to get clear from the worst of the mud. A moment later he doubled back, remembering something, cursing as the bank sucked at his boots.

He filled his waterskin at the riverside. No regard for the dirt and scum afloat in what he gathered. Not these days. He had something for that. He reached into his satchel and brought out a leather cord, tied round a small tarnished bronze medallion, scratched with a single sigil. He slipped it into his waterskin’s mouth a moment. When he pulled it back, the medallion gleamed wet, though the tarnish had grown worse.

Noor stood a ways from the bank, long hair turned whiplike by wind. A covered basket was strapped to her back, hunching her. Every bit the crone, Simra thought, but there was no knowing how old or young she truly was. No polite way to find out — but when had politeness ever been a concern of hers? Only in her ashlander way. Gift and ritual; the right words, and the wit to improvise round them.

“Best to get on,” she called out over the breeze. “There’s daylight yet, but less than there might be.” Her voice had grown stronger of late. For better or worse was still to be seen.

Simra glanced behind them, over the wide river, across to the hamlet. “Supplies first?”

Noor gave him a pitying look. “More?” she said. “After so long wasted in Bodram? Getting and spending… Bread and grains…”

Wasted? Thanks to her it was time lost to them already. Time that Simra had put to as good a use as he could. Saving what’s wasted from going to waste — a necromancer ought to’ve understood that, he thought.

Something stormy and sour must have crossed his face. When Noor spoke again, she spoke softer:

“We’ll travel faster burdened by less. You want to travel fast, don’t you?”

Simra gave a reluctant nod.

“Good. Can you hunt? Trap?”

And there it was again. A moment’s kindness, and then the crush of a question: Are you enough, Simra Hishkari? “Not as such,” he said.

“No matter.” Noor’s voice was sunny, strange and bright. “Tammu and I will forage as we go.” She paused. Cocked her head at him, with a look like someone trying to tongue something from between their backmost teeth. “What are you, Simra Hishkari?”

Simra’s face stiffened. His cheeks hollowed. The same question again, given voice this time. The urge to deflect struck fast as instinct. “The proud owner of the longest legs among us,” he said. “Try to keep up.”

And all the rest was hard pacing. Cross-country, at least until Ouadabridge. On foot. There was no point disputing it now they’d set out. And he was no wisewoman. Hardly an ashlander. Couldn’t hunt, couldn’t herd, hated to ride except when he’d hate walking worse. What did he know, then? Only that this seemed a bad trade. He’d tell them. First one to cry footsore, he’d tell them, and next time they’d listen to him. Next time, he’d have will to form the words. But for now they’d follow Noor’s wisdom. Like playing at cards, Simra saved his hand.

The land as they travelled stretched open. First the mountains of Stonefalls faded behind them, then the foothills too. After there was only starkness, steppe, shreds of scrub or seams of wet black dirt. Long grey-green grass, occasional as cresting waves in a sea of shorter blue-green grazing.

They travelled a rough southing course. One league, two leagues, three, trusting in Noor’s memory to see them right. For all Simra walked fastest among them, she was the one that led.

He had journeyed through the Northern Deshaan before, but never this part, and never off-road. Here was a gape of emptiness, featured only on the oldest and most outdated of his maps. Even then it was only a stretch of empty paper, equated by a black writhe of river: the Dathan. And there was an itching fear in that. Like staring into pitch-blackness, sure you feel things staring back. Who’s to say what an emptiness might turn out to be full of? Or why it should ever be anything pleasant?

“We safe to have a fire?” Simra asked as the sun began setting.

“I can make us safe,” Noor answered.

Simra kissed his teeth. By sword and spell, he could make them safe too. Difference was, he’d rather not have cause. He remembered the Rift, and the risk of showing yourself on the steppe. Lighting a cookfire was good as lighting a beacon in the open. Light by night, or the lure of smoke by day.

Still, in the last hour of light they had, he gathered what brush he saw. Spindly windfalls and dry spreads of fern. Knotted bulbs, half-hidden by grass. A dusty tumble of weed and straw, blown along in the breeze. Whatever he reckoned would burn.

As they began they were nowhere at all. A river and mountains for placemarks. Since then they’d left them behind. Now, as night closed in, the world grew tight, and where they were seemed a deeper nowhere still.

“Here,” said Noor. “We stop here.” She was breathless as she called it.

Simra dropped his bundle of brush and fuel.

Tammunei took the arm-long shape of hides and struts they carried from their back, and planted one picket-pointed end in the ground. Leaning close, they murmured something to it. A strange and pitchy line of song. A spell. And the yurt began to unfold.

Simra had seen it before. Countless times on countless nights, and in reverse come morning. But the process was soothing, subtle but impressive. A great and everyday magic of the kind that came natural in Morrowind. In Skyrim it’d be just as natural to see it as some outlandish excess. Weakness, decadence, witchcraft. To Simra it seemed like common sense.

Like some uncanny tree, the yurt spread roots from its central stem. Spider’s legs of twitching creaking growing bone that spread out to form a floor. Between them, hide stretched itself, like the leather of a bat’s wings, going from lustrous dark to pale cream-brown as it warped and spread wider. Limbs of wood reached up and out to form eaves, then wall-frames. The bones arched up and met to make a door. And from the yurt’s domed apex, yet more skin unfurled and stretched, to cover its slow-grown skeleton.

It was small. Room enough for one to sit and shelter in comfort. For two, Simra knew it, was cramped. For three..?

He muddled his fuel into a shallow-sided pyramid, built round a heart of dry grass. With outheld hands, he lit the heap in a rise and spray of sparks.

Noor by then was pacing a circle round their camp. A warbling husky song flowed from her as she walked. Round and round, head down, then up-bucked to the sky.

Magic, Simra supposed. She’d said she could make them safe. He crouched by the growing light of his fire and brought out his almanac, untucking the right chart from its pages. Stonefalls. He found the fork of the river they’d left, marked it, and wrote in a careful hand: ‘Fisher’s Fork’. If the place had no name before, it did now.

He placed his kettle on the fire, filled with enough water to cook mountain millet.

Abrupt as a change in the breeze, Noor finished her song. Trying to keep a stumble from her step, she came into the firelight and slumped to sit.

Something had changed. The night was darker, more enclosed. Frowning, Simra cricked back his neck to look at the sky. The moons and stars were gone.

“Safe,” breathed Noor.


	7. Chapter 7

_A long line straggled across Stonefalls._

_Before noon we’d crossed our final river. Hoped that, after, a high and headlong sun would help us dry and find warmth again. But the sky scowled full of clouds. Pale and powerless light; not a single shadow cast and no heat to heal the cold. We lit fires – those of us who could – but had nothing but magicka to burn. Soon they sputtered out._

_We lost two from that crossing. Not immediate, but as we carried on. As the riverland valley warped beneath our feet and turned to waterlogged marsh. The cold sapped their strength and gave nothing back. Our long line grew shorter._

_One collapsed while we travelled. Heavy working veins on their brow and temples. Sunken neck and hollowed chest and a half-drowned sound to their breathing. They couldn’t catch their breath. We stopped til it stopped, then we started again._

_The other was scarce out of childhood. Night took him. Morning found him stiff, with eyes half-open, lashes glazed with frost._

_His father was a Colovian Dunmer. A trapper and trader in furs. And his son’s death lit a fuse in him. Nothing at first. A shock that could pass almost for stoicism. And then each morning, for mornings after, we found him shaking, speaking to his son._

_“I should’ve kept you warm. We should’ve never come. I’d’ve burnt all I had if I knew. A strong lad, though. You were always strong. I’d’ve burnt them all…”_

_He turned pilgrim two days later. His faith before had been in hope, and profit, and new beginnings. The belief that with new places will come new prospects. Those are the little gods to which all willing migrants give their prayers. Now he sold it all for the chance to feel his fate had been taken from his hands. A reinvestment._

_That was the way with the pilgrims among us. At least the ones from settled Dunmer stock._

_The settlers trudged, weighed down by more than they could carry. Packs, sacks, rolled shelters, furled up bundles of wares or goods. Like dragon-cards they held close to their chests, to change their fate in the game’s last round. Or else the dried-up seeds by which they hoped, in the end, to plant a new home. They tore their clothes and the clothes of the dead to have more between them and the cold — for rag-ribbons to bind shut the openings of their sleeves and collars against the frosts that came at night._

_But the pilgrims carried almost nothing. Wore thin rags. Whited their brows and eye-sockets with ash and blacked their hands with cinders. Braved the cold both day and night, shrinking like wolves from the fires we lit against the dark. Desperation made them devout. Through clattering teeth they chattered prayers, to saints and spirits and the cast-out-come-again gods of the Dunmer. Prayers for all of us — anyone but themselves._

_I spoke to the former fur-trader soon after he had changed. A conversation coloured in shades of charcoal, out in the evening, past our fires._

_I’m not sure why. Those were days when religion made me uneasy. Not its existence in the world, but being around it, up close, not knowing the pushes and catches it’s planted in a faithful person’s mind. But I suppose I felt I owed him that much._

_In going pilgrim he’d wanted to burn all but all he had. “Mephala, wrap me in cinders. Azura, by smoke, hide me from myself. Boethiah, from the flames let me be reformed.”_

_But I persuaded him to give me his pelts. Told him that my mother had been a priestess to Blackhands Mephala in Blacklight, counting that he, as a heartlander, would reckon any foreign accent to sound foreign as any other. I told him that the gods felt cheated, being given skins in place of blood and meat and bones. This was before I learnt that Mephala will accept secrets as sacrifice, just as Boethiah will accept well-turned lies. Still, he believed me. Whether because of my story, or my closeness to Tammunei, I’ll never know._

_More than that, I was curious. I wanted to know if it had brought him peace. Beyond the death of his son, I wanted to know his reasons._

_“My suffering is holy,” he told me. “That’s clear to me now. It must be. A test to turn me onto true faith. To make sure that I deserve a place on Vvardenfell. What other reason could there be?”_

_The Vereansu pilgrims were different. It was shame that made them strive. Driven supplicant by their defeat at the hands of the dead in Bodram – dismounted, bow-legged, footsore – they cut lines in their cheeks for the kin they’d lost, and asked their ghosts and gods to forgive them. They gave up their yurts and slept beneath the stars to be always exposed to the sky. They made chimes from shards of shell and metal and hung them in their clothes and hair — belled themselves like lepers so they could neither hunt beasts nor hide from spirits as our journey went on, and on._

_They were sacred pariahs, I suppose. Cut from their old warbands, the other Vereansu ostracised and respected them in equal degree. Those who once were kin to them brought them knotweed to dye blue their ears and foreheads, clothes and fingers. Those who once were bound to them brought herbs to lend them trances, black pastes to bring numbness. Otherwise, they shunned them like victims of a plague, or a catching lunacy._

_Each in our own way, by then, we were all of us partway mad. So runs my reckoning. Or else why did we not turn back? What feels like stupidity now, and vanity, felt then like a mindless need. The world was where we were, and the world was where we were headed. Outside that, nothing but night. Formless, featureless, pointless._

_There were times I thought Bodram had driven Tammunei mad. Madder than most among us. But time went on. More likely, I came to think, that Bodram had taken from them much of what would help anyone pass for sane. Speech and sense and feeling, inside and out. No nerves would tell Tammunei when they were thirsty, or when their limbs would give up._

_The ashlanders saw it as strength. The settlers as inspiration. The pilgrims took it as piety. All were examples to follow._

_For me it was a bond. Tammunei needed me, and that was my madness. Not borne of what I’d lost, but what I still feared losing. A snare drawn tight around me, and tighter it felt each day. Tammunei walked the head of our column, and each day I walked alongside them. First to cross each river and first each night to call the halt. First to see Old Ebonheart unfade from off the horizon._

_Shattered domes and fallen spires. The long-keeled cave-ins of tiled hall roofs. A slow decline on either side — the city crawling into the sea, as we crawled into the sea, as the sea crawled always closer._

_That night we found an enclosure. A break from the wind that grew worse the nearer we came to the sea. I think it had been a lumber yard. The long bodies of trees lay about us on three sides. Huge trunks like fallen columns, piled up into barricades. Someone had cut them for timber, and something had brought them here._

_In the damp and down the years the great trunks had gone to rot. Bark to black slime; heartwood to homes for burrowing things. Tammunei told me they could hear them, living countless inside. New life in the dead wood, thriving and teeming._

_I had grown better at reading Tammunei’s silence by then. The tilts of their head and angles of their eyes. The makings and shapings of their silent mouth. I didn’t know what Bodram took would ever be returned. Or that what I’d learnt to do for Tammunei would ever be unneeded._

_The pack of Vereansu that had joined with us at Bodram could not ride in the brack-soft ground of the Balda estuary — neither guar nor ponies, for on the mainland one can rear both. It shamed them to go on foot, and to make burden-beasts of their mounts, but under omens of defeat they’d sworn to follow. It would shame them worse to turn back. Unable to ride, they turned to hunting, for meat to feed our long-travelling line, and scraps to feed their pride._

_When we made camp there, among the heaps of timber, we had fires for warmth and meat for roasting. Beasts that lived in the delta and that the Vereansu called ‘guriguti’. With their skin on they looked like an odd marring of a marmot and an enormous toad, with bony beaks in place of teeth. Skin off and flesh seared by flame, they tasted a little like rabbit, though with more meat on their bird-thin bones, and a gamier vegetal musk to their flavour._

_Tammunei pitched their yurt. Together we squatted outside it, eating gurigut, talking as best we could with the tools that each we had._

_“Nords did this,” I said. “Must have been. Trees like this — I’ve never seen them growing anywhere in Morrowind. Never heard of them growing anywhere in Morrowind.”_

_My Dunmeris by then was a workable thing, fit to any earnest task but too clumsy still for eloquence. I had to invent words. Stitch them from scratch out of what I knew. Speaking for someone to read my lips made me speak slower, more clear than I was used to. And perhaps in its way, that helped._

_“Only in Skyrim,” Tammunei told me. “Parts of Cyrodiil, near to the border.”_

_I nodded, frowning. “The Eastmarch. I used to see barges full of Eastmarch timber, going downriver, out to sea. Never understood how they stayed overwater. Wood floats, I suppose…” Stupid. I rushed to move on. “That was in Windhelm, when I worked on the docks. When I worked with my hands I saw them up close. Then less close, farther and farther as they broke the horizon. But when I worked with my mind – with pen and ink and counting-beads – I saw the numbers they stood for. Sailed for. I used to write the prices attached to them. Prices for if they arrived safe and sold what they carried. Prices for if they sunk. All more than I’d earn in a year. Often far more. And now they’re here. Rotting. Wasted…”_

_Tammunei waited, wearing a listening face. Nodded when I tailed off. “I know,” they mouthed. The word that followed was difficult. When they split it into syllables, I found I already knew it. “Morayat,” Tammunei said. “I remember from the Morayat.”_

_A foreign word where it belongs, but one not belonging here. Worlds away from the world we’d walked into. A word from home. The Morayat was the riverward section of Windhelm, carved out between Grey Quarter and the White River’s water. A dry-dock once, hewn from the stone, and filled for as long as I remember with ashlanders still too Velothi for the Quarter itself. A tangle of yurts and moor-ropes. Firelight, drumming, song by night._

_“How do you know the Morayat?” I said._

_Tammunei’s face shifted. A kind of crestfall and confusion. I think I wore it too. “I was a child in the Morayat. Harrowed in Skyrim. Two of my mothers live there still, I think.”_

_It was easier to smile than spell out my feelings. I smiled. “My mother too. Not in the Morayat. In stone. Under stone. In the Quarter…” I paused. Spoke before I could stop. “Morrowind fits you. I’d thought you were born here.”_

_“I was.”_

_I asked a wordless question with my face._

_“Quite near here. A little west, a little south. Between mountains. Between Morrowind and Cyrodiil. Between places. Blacklight came after.”_

_“And then Windhelm? How?”_

_Tammunei’s shoulders moved. A shrug or a sign of discomfort. “We were moved.”_

_“I didn’t know.”_

_“You didn’t ask.”_

_I’d spent so long with Tammunei asking about Morrowind that I’d never thought to ask about anywhere else. Now a past stretched out behind them. Looking like mine and unlike mine. Feeling from them like a small betrayal. From me like a misstep — callous. But it birthed a brittle hope: Tammunei had been like me once. And for all the Quarter had left its mark on them, and for all Skyrim had raised them from child to grown mer, Morrowind had taken them in. Made Tammunei its own, as they had made it theirs._


	8. Chapter 8

The pen fell. Loose ink spattered his page like the sky’s first warnings of rain. Black against the not-quite-white of ivory, teeth, and parchment. A curse formed in Simra’s throat but stuck in the cellar of his mouth. It came out as only a hiss. Irritation and a small serrated note of fear.

A flash of pain in the frets of his right hand. The lines raised just beneath his skin that shifted and flexed when his fingers moved. The pain was there between them, blue and blinding. But only for a moment, and that was nothing new. Nothing unique to today.

The strangeness came with what the pain smuggled in. Like a cardsharp’s false tell, or the smokescreen of sudden truths that hide one small and crucial lie. Simra couldn’t feel his fingers. A spasm as the pain came in, and after that they were stiff and still. They’d dropped the pen. Felt the resistance of the page through his wrist and arm as he touched it, but couldn’t feel the parchment itself.

His eyes bolted wide. Of a sudden his breath came sharp, cold in his lungs with how quick he drew it in. His chest hurt. A heavy aching shape clamped down over his scalp and temples. A closed helmet of panic, pressing in, closing off. Hacking the edges out from his vision.

He couldn’t breathe. Felt fingers close round his wrist. Felt a wrenching hand at the roots of his hair. Pull back—

Not now, not now. Please, not now.

Simra coughed. Forced open his eyes.

Look. Look at where you are. Here isn’t there and then isn’t now.

He coughed again, forcing it out of him. Making the breath leave. Flattening his lungs out empty til they had to wrench air back in. Breathe…

Wind worried at the grass of the plains. Rubbed itself like a cat against his sides, pressing over his cheeks, pawing into the folds of his faded patchwork scarf. Like ripples on a lake, the grass flickered. Its colour flashed as its blades caught the light, hid from the light, danced in the morning light. Blue-green, grey-green, blaze of autumn copper.

Noor was where he’d left her. Perched crowlike in the arms of a stunted black-fleshed tree. No leaves on its limbs for the coming Winter. Just a dark flutter of ragged robes amongst its branches. Sometimes a rise-and-fall murmur of song, coming up dry and low from her throat then rising to almost a howl. A mourning keening thing, more like birdsong – wolfsong – than the music made by people.

Simra was sat just as before. Back to the treetrunk, seat to its dry and twisted roots. He’d managed to block out Noor’s song after a time. He’d written through worse and louder things. The dinning persistence of a storm, railing on a thin and fragile roof. The injured groan of ancient machinery as it ran on to pointless purpose, unseen inside the walls. The taproom din of cornerclubs. The raucous songs of drunks — these ones with words at least, but scarce more tuneful than whatever spell Noor was casting.

And Tammunei was still gone. Only finding food by their own uncanny means. They’d be back to find Simra and Noor soon after.

Fine. This was fine. This had become familiar. Three days of this had gone by since Fisher’s Fork and more were yet to come.

Simra looked at the sky. Blue-white, pain-coloured, woven with spits and skinny islands of cloud. High and bright and, in one far-flung corner, broken by a formation of winged and flying things.

He waited for sensation to come back to his fingers. Tried to cut off his mind from them. If he started thinking into them, trying to make the nerves reply, the fear would only come back when he found that still they were silent. So he didn’t. He sat. And with a rag pinched between thumb and point-finger, he blotted up the worst of the ink his falling pen had spattered…

“What are you doing?” Noor’s voice came down from the tree. Her speaking rather than singing voice. A flow had come back into it where before it was creaky with dry disuse. A recent thing, new with the past few days. “Are you hurt..? You seem hurt.”

Simra’s lips pinched together, hiding the grit of his teeth. Tammunei would’ve asked too, if they’d been here. They would’ve asked the same question but gentle, caring more than curious. Simra would sooner no-one saw or thought to ask at all.

“Just writing,” he said. “Spilt ink, that’s all.”

“What is?”

“What? The words I’m writing or the mistake I just made?” Simra kissed his teeth. If he’d stepped halfway into Noor’s jibe, at least he could finish it himself. “Both probably.” At least she was talking to him — not about and over him anymore. And now the conversation was a welcome diversion.

“Do you write better than you talk?”

A strange question.

“I write…slower than I talk. Makes me think more before I choose the words and put them together. Whether that’s better..? Tsscht. Not in Dunmeris, no.”

“You speak well,” said Noor.

For a moment Simra plumbed her tone for some trace of insult or irony. It was strange, finding none.

“I’ve heard you speak well,” she continued. “And in Dunmeris too. And clanspeak. Why teach yourself to write better than that, when it only culls down the number of people who will hear what you say? Limits it to those who can read? Flattens your words and makes them breathless?”

Still no trace of insult. Only a picking piercing curiosity.

“You don’t read then?” Simra asked. “Or write?”

“A clansmer remembers by remembering. I prefer my knowledge to be living. Moving. Not pinned down and stiff.”

“So that’s a ‘no’ then, hm?”

Simra thought for a long instant. Made himself speak slow and deliberate, like his thoughts flowed while writing. It was a trick he’d taught himself to use when weight of words mattered more than their speed or their number.

“I write down my words to pull them out of the present,” he began. “Spoken words live for only as long as you breathe them. A story you remember and tell out loud is like something growing, living, changing. Swimming fish. Flying birds. Running deer. Like anything living, those stories can die. Or get sick, injured, twisted in too many tellings. But a story in a book isn’t dead. Just not living. Not like that. It doesn’t change and it doesn’t die. It just is. And it doesn’t need a teller because it’ll carry on telling itself. Outlasting the living. Carrying my words to places my voice can’t reach. Soundless, straight into people’s heads. And even if I forget, or my tongue and brain fall silent, what I’ve written will remember itself. My truth will remain.”

“…You must write very well…”

Simra couldn’t help but smile. His teeth flashed out from behind his scarred lips. The smile tore out into a lopsided child-simple grin.

“Thank you,” he said, voice hammered thin.

Most praise sat ill with him. No matter how much he longed for it, or how long he went reckoning he’d more than earnt it, the moment someone gave voice to it, in earnest compliments or in flattery, it felt undeserved. His mind would invent a dozen reasons why he fell short. Why he wasn’t and would never be enough. But the few times someone had spoken high of his words or his writing, Simra felt himself start to glow.

For a time he and Noor were silent. She didn’t start to sing again. An inviting silence then. Still open.

“Your sigils,” Simra asked. “What about them? I’ve seen you use them. Aren’t they a kind of writing?”

“Hm… A kind of recording, yes.”

“But not language, right? Magic?”

“Music. So yes, also magic. A little like what you said, about written words. They’re a way for a spell to keep singing itself. So yes, perhaps a kind of writing too… But there must still be a singer. The song, the spell, and the strength still come from the wisewoman who cast it. It’ll still draw on her. The shape of the sigil inside her – solid – a shape that strength won’t fill until the singing of the sigil stops.”

Simra gave a slow nod. “I think I understand. It’s…a kind of vessel. A trap that keeps a sliver of your magicka outside of you, reserved, sustaining itself?” Before leaving her warren underneath Bodram, Noor had scrubbed out every chalk-scratched sigil she’d made.

“It’s a song that can still sound out in silence,” Noor answered without answering. As if she didn’t want to play into the words he was using. “That’s all.”

“You speak well too,” he said. “Far more music in your Velothis than mine. Sibilance and rhythm. The stuff poetry’s made from…”

Noor clucked in the back of her throat. “Poetry’s only half-made music, child. Songs that can’t find a melody.”

Simra shrugged. “Or words that don’t need melody to sound out with all the strength and sweetness music has. It depends on the poetry.”

“Depends on the music.”

The horizons spanned wide and empty. Leagues on leagues. Where was Tammunei in all of that? Simra watched as one of the flying things dropped from formation and fell. It might’ve been a catching swoop on the animal’s part, but just as much, it might’ve been the sudden weight of an arrow, dragging it to ground.

“‘Recording’,” Simra said. “That’s the word you used. Are the sigils ever used without magic? To write down songs? To pass them on? Can they be used to teach?”

He all but heard Noor’s frown from where she still perched above him. “What would be the point? The songs a wisewoman sings aren’t songs written by the clans. They’re songs the clans found by listening. They belong to the world. We only sing them back, singing into the wider music of things….and to suggest…changes.” She moved on. “Sigils are the same. Found things, like spell-songs are. A wisewoman’s teacher doesn’t teach them. She only shows them how to listen. How to find them.”

Noor was clearer in talking about these things. Telling Simra what he’d tried to tease out from Tammunei’s head on any number of occasions. Things he’d tried to pull from out of his mother’s closed mind for years before, and gotten only cryptic denials and solid walls of silence. Perhaps it was because she had teaching in her, where Tammu had only knowing and Ishar had only keeping. Perhaps it was because Noor had gone so long with no-one to talk to that now she was glad to speak of anything at all, and to anyone…

“Could I learn them?” Simra asked. “Learn to listen, sing, write sigils of my own?”

“Some,” Noor said. “Herd-songs, war-songs… There are songs any clansmer can learn, though some can sing them stronger than others. But you know some already. I’ve seen the way you call fire. Calling-words you remember, but with fingers weaving patterns you know without knowing what they are or how you came upon them… But there are other greater spell-songs you could never be taught.”

“Because I’m not a woman?”

“Because you’re not a wisewoman.”

“Tammunei is, but under Bodram you called them ‘brother’.”

“I did…” Noor said, uncertain. “I wouldn’t again so lightly. He was born my brother. She was harrowed as my sister… More than that, I won’t say while Tammunei isn’t here to speak for herself.”

Another slow nod from Simra. That much he could understand.

“Nadinath hael,” he said. You honour me. Words of gratitude, formal, in Velothis. “Thank you for speaking with me like this. Sharing the words you did.”

“This was a good conversation,” came Noor’s careful response.

Feeling had returned to Simra’s fingertips by then, slipping in unnoticed, as if it had never left. Perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps it was just him. A weakness in the mind that had mended itself. A stutter in time, where memory blurred forward, real as a dream in the dreaming, then gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that occasionally I'm gonna be using scraps of headcanon-Velothis. Ashlander-speak. I can't take credit for most of the bits I use in the slightest, because even the barebones parts I improvise myself are informed and usually put past Tarhiel - writer of the excellent 'How To Disappear Completely' - whose skills as a conner of langs are like way beyond my own, and whose work on Velothi language stuff is tremendous. Just sayin'.


	9. Chapter 9

In Simra’s mind the days lined up. They passed by, lined off and behind, becoming hazy — at least as hazy as his sober memories ever grew with time. But the plains of the Northern Deshaan were good for that. Nothing to stand out save what did, and what did loomed large as idols in amongst that ocean of nothing.

In the landscape, a standing tree, or snarl of scrubland shrubbery. A patch of brown groundwater that mirrored the sky in sepia. In the distance once, a shining line in the afternoon sun: the arm of a stream bending tribute to the River Dathan. Crossing the latter would mark their halfway point. They’d find it either way, but opted towards the stream, to follow it, so at least they’d have fresh water until they did.

And that was good.

It meant no thirst.

It meant fish sometimes that Tammunei caught, sitting by the streamside and just waiting, humming at intervals, as the minnow-skinny smallfry came to the shallows to be snatched up into an open-mouthed pot. They would’ve been better dredged in flour and fried – the crunch of their tiny bones indistinct from the crunch of the golden crumb on them; Simra had had them that way in Narsis, and enjoyed them pretty well – but as soups with forage-greens and lengths of succulent reed they staved off hunger.

It meant having a kind of road to guide them. The stream always by them, to judge progress, keep their bearings.

It meant being able to steal away and wash. Face, hands, hair, with leech-lily scented soap, til at least the parts of him the sky and wind saw felt scoured clean. For the rest he had his cantrips, and water to cast them with.

In two batches, Simra had laundered his clothes in Bodram. Or rather he’d had them laundered for him. And that was something new. An expensive novelty to which he’d like to get better used.

A shirt in morning-blue scribsilk, folding diagonal across the breast to fasten in a line of brass buttons. Two were crescent-shaped, one was missing, and replaced with a toggle of polished wood. Band collar, trim shoulders, both embroidered in dark thread with a beehive pattern of hexagons. Launder it as he might, fond and sour memories both clung to it like a lingering scent. He’d bought it in Suran, all but four years ago.

Longer years still hung on his woollen Riftfolk tunic, and yet it held out. Well-made, but it ought to’ve been for the price — or how steep it had seemed at the time. Beasts ran in black-stitched thread around its bottom hem; red-stitched curls of foliage and flower petals around its wide deep collar. A freckling of faded red-brown stains still dappled its front after all this time. He wore it over the other, loose fit over slim, layered against the cold.

Deep-brown leggings too, close-cut and made from kreshwave. The fabric was combed til soft and supple, but teeth-pulling-hard to tear, and in trousers that was a blessing. At the back, attached at the waist, was a kind of train made from netch-leather. Hanging down like coat-tails it could flutter at the backs of his knees, but these days he wore it in front, buttoned around his hips in a lopsided kilt.

Body clean, they all kept mostly clean too, save for the dust. Those and the others. Ragpicker’s patchwork scarf. The once-gift of his goatskin mantle, napped smooth with wear and age and rain. Strange, but his jacket – his sister’s jacket – seemed to keep clean by itself, worn between his capelike mantle and shirts.

His boots were the exception, but weren’t they always? How many pairs had he had down the years? Ruined? Things were simpler – cheaper – before he wore shoes, but by now there was no going back, was there? These ones were two-toed native-made things, made from guar-leather and rising to just over the knee. There they led into a pair of quilted-leather kneepads – scuffed, gashed open, restitched – and tied in at the rear of his legs with bows of red-dyed ribbon. Those were pretty at least. There were plenty of times he liked them better than the boots themselves…

The soles and heels though would need mending before long. But why should that come as a surprise, when his feet did so much work of late? When he’d had them – what? – eight months now, and since had run them ragged. It was only fair that they’d beg for a break. Just like it was fair that he’d ask them to wait a while longer. Stockings, leggings, shirts — he had bone needles, a little redware thimble, and could darn them well enough if never good-as-new. Cobbling was different. Boots were expensive. Making and mending them took skill he lacked.

Soon, Simra thought, without knowing when.

The days formed stanzas. Same rhythms, same shapes, and struggling along with the same trudging theme.

But the grey had ended as it always did, and by contrast everything shone, everything sang — until there’d been shine and song enough to take them both for granted again.

The sun began to set.

Noor was singing again. Birdsong, wolfsong — a drone down in her throat that rose up by and by, offering high head-notes to the wind.

Tammunei had caught an eel. Better that by far than the smallfry they usually landed. With the fire already lit, Simra began filleting it, the way Tammunei had taught him.

He had a knife for it: a skinny fisherman’s filleting blade with an uptrailing point, living as part of a pair in a pocketlike sheathe that hung from his swordbelt. Almost funny how he’d had it two years and only just began to use it for its actual-made purpose. Almost.

Simra set to work. In behind the gills then round in a slit circle. Tugging away the mottled skin from head down to tail. Teasing along the spine, blade flat to bone, freeing a long strip of fatty meat from each side. It was meditative after he’d gotten past the constant urge to wash his hands.

“Got any idea what she’s doing?” he asked Tammunei, nodding at Noor. “Or’s your guess good as mine? Is it the same thing every night, or different songs? I can’t tell.”

They sat by the streamside, perched on a flat dry rock. Catkinned reeds rose around them, downy heads bobbing. The water whispered as it journeyed by. Tammunei looked at home by water, Simra reckoned — at ease.

“Herding-songs,” Tammunei answered, cutting away two stiff green skewers of reed with a use-knife and passing them to Simra. “I think that’s what they are. Sort of.”

“‘Sort of’..?” echoed Simra. He remembered the stories his father used to tell, of whistles and songs to call his guar together across the Grazelands in the evening. A moment later it came clear. “Dust and bones, she’s not hurrying along some herd of invisible guar I don’t know about, is she? No. It’s them!” He lowered his voice. “The ghosts she tied together in Bodram. What was it she said? A whisper of them’ll come with her? She’s herding them along. Calling. Making sure that whisper knows where to find her…right? Is that right?”

His voice was eager, wolf-paced, like this new curiosity was a hunger that he was scoffing answers to sate. Tammunei was neutral, voice small and flat, less certain though in sureness they knew more about this than Simra could hope to.

“They’re with me too,” Tammunei said. “She helped them grow and get strong, but I’m still there at the roots…”

Simra pierced and threaded the fish, switchback onto the lengths of reed. Neat work. Satisfying. He held them over the flames to roast. As the fire-warmth seeped into his bones, a fever-itch set into his right hand, beneath the dirty bandage he couldn’t bring himself to remove.

“I can hear them,” Tammunei continued. “Quiet, but I can hear if I listen.”

Simra frowned, both not-knowing and half-knowing how that might feel. When memory overlayed the present it put faint ghosts in everything. “What’re they saying?”

“Mostly they’re happy. They think she’s bringing them home…”

Tammunei was frowning too. Their tongue pointed brief and red over their lips. A hand rose to the long line of their neck, stroking, then gripping uneasy at their throat.

Something in this sat ill with them, Simra reckoned. Strange, when keeping ghosts happy had been all Tammunei wanted for so long…

Noor stopped her singing and went over to her baggage where it was heaped outside the yurt. She travelled light. Just a covered basket strapped to her back and the pockets in her robes. But now Simra watched over the fire and the skewers of sizzling eel as she opened the basket and reached inside to bring out a leather drawstring bag.

She hummed under her breath again as she walked a ways from their camp, through the grasses of the plain until she was out of earshot and almost out of sight. Her hand went into the bag. Came out in a fanning fling of motion, scattering something — like planting seedgrain.

“What’s she doing?” Simra whispered. She couldn’t hear them now, surely. Not at a whisper, and too far off for them to hear her.

“Bones,” came Tammunei’s thin voice. “She’s seeding them. So that those who weren’t Vereansu will be bound to the plains as much as to Bodram. More maybe. Like she is. Like her ancestors b—”

They stopped abrupt. Noor was walking back. New lines crossed her brow, it seemed, and sweat stood out on her face. When she reached the fire she had eyes for neither of them. Mute like her tongue was still elsewhere. She only slumped down beside the fire, a pile of rags and bones once more.

She’d spent herself, that much was clear, but on what great change? Her ghosts, Tammunei said, thought she was bringing her home. All of them, when so many had lived and died in Bodram. She was starting to change what home meant to them — where home was.

Simra set his lips and tried not to think anymore. About it, or Noor, or where the limits of her power might lie. Or of the drawstring pouch in his gathersack, smaller than Noor’s but with almost the same rattle.

They ate the eel, shared off the skewers. Its fatty white-grey flesh roasted well, and had turned red-gold in the heat. Simra imagined it with sticky saltrice, the fish glazed in black mazte vinegar and sprinkled with crushed pink pepper. The snap and crunch of pickled vegetables. But remembering them only made him taste their absence, bitter in each mouthful.

The stars came out. Tonight there was nothing to hide them.

Tammunei offered first watch.


	10. Chapter 10

The second watch was Simra’s. It began in the hours before dawn. Black the sky overhead, and spat full of cold white stars. A rare and colourless kind of night with Masser’s red ragged crescent as its only contradiction.

Simra sat beneath it all, not risking a light. To his back was the yurt, cant-shaped and filled with soft-sleeping breath. He leaned with his back to its outer wall, facing the doused ashes of their evening cookfire. Without its embers the night was cold. Simra drew the fleecelined goatskin of his mantle around himself and waited.

Wasn’t that what every kind of guard-duty was? Waiting for something to happen and hoping that it wouldn’t. He was protecting them. Watching the horizon. But not if there was nothing out there to protect them from. Then it was only wasted time. At least if he had a light then he could’ve spent the time reading — writing maybe. Doing nothing had always frustrated him.

“Tsscht…” He hissed from between clenched teeth and rose to his feet.

The shadowy voice of the whispering stream. The click and jangle of metal and coral and glass as Simra moved, and the beads and links and charms he wore moved with him. He circled the yurt first, tramping down grass that their lingering here had already laid flat. Staring a ring around their encampment, he look over all four horizons and found them all empty. Only the liquid pinpricked height of the sky, and below it the solid blackness where the stars disappeared and the land began.

Somewhere – east, it must be – a pale brown glow was cresting the edge of things. It would be twilight soon, then full-dawn; sunrise and a day of walking with only a half-night’s half-sleep to keep him lively.

“Fuck that…” he muttered. “Not that there’s any way’ve getting out of it. There’s the rub, right? Inevitability. Fuck that…”

If Noor had saved her strength enough to hide them, as she had these last few nights, they would’ve all slept. Poor sleep, in Simra’s case. Resting all but rough in the crowded yurt; entrapped in a tangle of breathing and bodies and surrounded by the threat of touch — he slept little enough that way. No way to change that without drinking his eyes heavy and his head blank. But he’d had worse, hadn’t he? Gone with slimmer chances of sleep for longer by far than this.

The dust-coloured dawn turned bronze. In skeins and shards of halos, dim traces of blue rose round it: the edges of the Mage’s cloak, and between them the stars that made up the Atronach. Overhead, the star-cloud cloak of the Warrior bled in through the darkness, a red rearguard for the fleeing night sky. What did that mean? An omen – a Warrior’s Dawn – or nothing at all?

Kishewyr would have known. Or at least pretended he’d known, depending on how deep he was in his cups by then. Simra remembered the rambling auguries; the breathless excitement over things the night sky did above Lake Amaya — above both of their backtilted faces. How many nights had he sat, a quieter kind of drunk than Kishewyr, listening to the old stargazer comb through the heavens while they sat in his muddled little herb-garden below, on the outskirts of a village with no name? Often enough for Kishewyr to leave his mark. In the years that hung between then and now, Simra had never been able to look at the stars and see them simply. Of all the marks that village had left on him, it was good to remember some were pleasant.

Twilight came. Red the sky above, but grey the world below. Mist crawled on the face of the stream. Cold dew weighed down the long grass.

Simra walked to the water. Every sound was eerie, enormous beyond what it ought to have been. The click of the streambank’s stones as he crossed them. Their crush as he knelt to fill his cupped hands, and splash cold streamwater over his face, numbing the muscles but jolting his nerves awake.

He knuckled at his closed eyes, rubbing the heaviness from them. When he opened them again, the horizon had changed. A warrior’s dawn.

First he saw the banner. A long streak of white, twisting in the wind like smoke, but tied round the shaft of a spear. Four tall shapes huddled below it: riders at a stand in the tall grass. They were still a ways upstream, still on the far side of the water. But that was false hope, false mercy. They were mounted predators, chasing prey that went on foot.

Already Simra’s left hand had jerked down to his boot, scrambling for the touch of metal. His wet fingers closed round something cold. A crooked length of tin and iron. A wand. Instinct and growing fear clamoured inside him, but he forced himself to draw the wand out slow, incidental — keep it held low and hidden from them, on his left side.

“Calm!” he hissed, praying to his tensing muscles and racing mind. “Calm…” His body wanted to bolt. Get the yurt between him and them. Instead he crouched still as stone. Sidelong, not turning his head, he watched them without looking. He tried to think.

They were unmoving for now. Only the occasional jostle of their mounts beneath them, echoing an unease their riders wouldn’t show — or didn’t feel. Hard to tell weapons at this distance, but you didn’t need to be able to see a strung bow to be shot by one.

“Shit…” Simra swore and broke into a low dash. “No no no no no…”

He hadn’t meant to. But staying still, on open ground, to be quilled full of arrows? The fear had welled up. A surge of panic. It carried him into the cover of the yurt. He dropped behind it, hidden now, but blind.

“Fuck!” He brought up the heel of his palm, striking against his forehead. “Stupid stupid stupid..! Up! Both of you! Get up!” He slapped against the yurt’s flank, like striking a horse on the haunch to set it running.

Run. Was that what he had planned? Run from raiders, mounted and through flatlands, grasslands, the steppe of the Northern Deshaan? There were stupider things one might do, but not many. So if not that, then what?

The yurt’s door furled open.

“Don’t!” Simra hissed. “Don’t both come out! We know their numbers but they don’t know ours. That’s — We can —…”

Tammunei stared out from inside. Tired eyed, they wore worry almost like a sadness. A mouth with fallen corners; red eyes gone to glass.

“Four of them,” Simra hurried to explain, backtracking. “Riders. Over the water but in bowshot but I don’t know if they have bows or how many have bows but why wouldn’t they if they’re Vereansu and why wouldn’t they be Vereansu out here?”

“Are they flying a banner?” Noor’s voice came from within, calm as the face of a lake left alone by wind and rain.

“Long. White. Black stitches maybe, hard to tell.”

“You’re sure about the stitches?”

Simra’s face screwed tight, scowling as he tried to think. “Yes — No! — I don’t know!” He took a deep breath. Let it go. “I’m not sure. Think it was just white.”

“Clanless, then. Shamed survivors, outcasts from their kinbands. Marked for death, or else for glory. Or both.”

Simra kissed his teeth. “Familiar…” he muttered. There was enough of that about in Skyrim without it finding him here, years and worlds away. “Nothing to lose then, and all to gain? Fuck… They’ll fight hard.”

“Then why fight them at all?” said Tammunei.

“‘Cos we sure as fucking sunrise can’t run!” Simra broke into patois. “You and me? Snow’s chance in a stream of piss. Noor? No fucking chance at all.”

“Why are they not already on us?”

“I don’t know! Because they don’t know how fucked we are? They’re fucking watching. Waiting til we show our hand. Do we fight or flee?”

“Run,” said Noor, “and it becomes a hunt. A chase. They’ll like that.”

“Will they?” Simra closed his eyes. Chewed his lip. A thought came. “Listen…” he began.

There was something Soraya had told him once. When he was younger, and she was young, and he still thought she knew everything. Shine bright, she’d said, and show out strong. Meekness does the meek no favours, and sheepishness benefits only the wolves. Adders backed with diamonds, she said, and wasps in yellow and black — all that colour and bluster sends a message:

‘I’m not prey. Fuck with me at your peril.’

Times were, Simra had listened to her on that. Be what you are, but seem to be more. Fiercer, furious, not worth the trouble.

Times were, he told himself that was at least half the reason he liked what he liked, wore what he did. Lacquered beads and arm-rings of brass. Rings of silver in the gristle of his left ear and a ring of gold pierced through the lobe. Bangles, silk, ribbons; eyes edged with kohl whenever he blighted well felt like it…

But if it was half the reason, that meant it was only half-true. And there were times he knew it was better to seem less than what you were. Use weakness to hide your strength.

Tammunei ran first.

In the mouth of the yurt, Simra had watched them mix a dark smudge of gum in one palm, wetting it to a paste and then, with a use-knife, making a small cut in their arm. Face cold, they rubbed the paste in, green-black blending with the small red upwelling of blood. So they wouldn’t slow Simra down, they’d said.

And now they bolted, gathersack over a shoulder, scattering out and across the plain.

A moment later, Simra fled too. Back turned on the yurt they’d left behind. Back turned on the stream and the riders and the white banner. Swordbelt jolting and slapping against his side as he sprinted for all he was worth after Tammunei.

The warwail sounded out behind them. The sound the Vereansu make to cast out their fear and send it singing off into the hearts of their enemies. Simra had hoped for that. Had been waiting for it, counting on it, knowing it meant commitment. But even so, it came over him like a chill, almost making him stumble.

It began as a clean howling, then it rolled and articulated. An ululation. That was the bounce of their saddles sounding in their voices; the sudden run of their mounts as they gave chase.

Simra had run too far to hear them cross the water. But they must have crossed. Must have. He had to believe that. Couldn’t look back.

Ahead, Tammunei fleeted through the grass, cutting swathes deeper into the plain. The back of their robe, like beating wings. In front, the first yolk-yellow spills of sunrise.

Simra ran, and waited for the signal without knowing what it would be. That was all she’d said. That there’d be one. A signal.

When the screaming started, he knew. Not a sound bound up with how a voice ought to work. No throat or tongue or lungs in this. Just breathless shrilling rage.

Simra scrambled to a halt. Almost stumbled into a crouch to break his pace, knees bent, boots skidding for purchase on the dew-wet ground. By then he was turned, staring back the way he’d run from. The wand slipped out from his sleeve and he came up, wild eyes wide and searching.

A rider almost on him, twenty paces and gaining. A broad-cheeked face, deep-scarred in a tally of lines and nestled in a leatherscaled hood of armour. Red plume of ragged cloth streaming out behind. Shaggy brown pony and wind-licked mane. The sound of hooves and the fear that came with them.

From the saddle, the rider canted their bow to shoot straight for Simra. Arrow nocked, they drew the string, bent the limbs…

Simra walked towards them. Step, and step, and step, slowed by force of will, even and exacting. The wand came up. Pointed. Simra’s fingers found the runes and joined them.

The rider’s eyes went hollow, then filled with realisation.

They both shot at once. Whispering arrow and the bolt from the wand, like a silence twisting and reordering itself.

Simra let himself flinch. Moved with it, into a low-bending duck as he loosed the bolt, shooting half-blind. The air parted overhead. No pain. Just dew and dirt on the hand he’d used to steady his drop, and no telling if it was his dodge or the rider’s lost nerve that had saved him.

Instinct stopped him coming up again. Instead he scrambled to one side, hissing as a thunder of hooves and weight passed him by. A charge that had almost crushed him. Now he was on his side. Knees and a bracing hand. Feet tearing furrows in the turf.

The pony was past him, dancing a tight circle, rearing as the rider tried to turn it, reining it in and around. They had a sword drawn now. No help inbound, not for either of them.

Simra aimed. He had time now. Screaming in his ears and a sound like the breeze being torn in two. Clouds opening, the grass fluttering hungry. Ignore it, he told himself. He had time.

The second bolt of writhing force caught the rider in the ribs and tore them from their saddle. Simra didn’t stop to check the kill as the grass swallowed them, and their horse turned off at a gallop. Instead he looked towards the stream again.

By the yurt, one of the Vereansu hung in mid-air. Stiff, limbs wrenched outward, as if stretched on a rack that couldn’t be seen. They were silent, but the air itself was screaming, shimmering with motion, and sound that made Simra’s stomach turn. Noor stood near the yurt where she had hid, and waited, to catch the raiders in the rear. Now she watched as one of the limbs went strange, limp, out at a sickening angle. As the hanging rider gurgled, trying to scream, before their neck twisted, and they slumped to the ground.

There was one more. They had fallen, Simra saw, but stood now, up from the long grass and threw aside a broken bow. They drew a long blade. A trailing gleaming curve in the air as they beat a loping run towards Noor.

Simra was running too now. Drawing his sword without thinking.

The warwail again, but this time from only one throat, and stopping abrupt. It choked out, then fell silent.

For an instant, Simra saw the shadows of the sunrise, and the dark between each blade of grass, shift and flow upward, over the last raider like a wave — a pouncing animal. Calling birds, a screeching wind, and all the sounds of hunger. And the Vereansu’s back split open, bones wrenching free from flesh. They fell, hidden beneath the pasture. It was a mercy not to see.

Tammunei stood nearby, where they hadn’t before. They were clutching a small something in both hands, and spattered red from the ends of their hair to the trembling tips of their fingers.


	11. Chapter 11

“Water… Please…”

The dreaming and delirium that came from pain. Pulled past the ends of their wits, at least that stopped them from begging mercy. You could even mistake it for acceptance. But Simra’s Velothis was enough to know otherwise. Enough to hear their prayers, their promises, their pleas for anything to quench their sudden blood-loss thirst. It was easier not to understand. Killing Argonians in the South had been simpler, for that reason if not for others.

“Water…”

Simra had pulled his thoughts inside himself. Had to, for this work. They simmered and scraped there. Turned and turned like a fleabitten beast, chasing an itch it couldn’t quite reach. But they couldn’t get out, and for now that was what mattered. No interference, no complications. His outer self was slow, methodical, practical, and deaf as he could make it.

Two were already dead. He tried not to think how. He’d seen – true – but did that mean he had to remember? Like as not, yes. He knew that. Long hard-learnt experience had taught him that. And it was hard to forget ghosts that turned the air to grasping gripping hands, twisting limbs out of joint and breaking necks by force of numbers… Hard to forget a shape of shadow and dust that moved like a wolf and swooped like a hawk and tore the spine straight from the back of a still-living body… But he could hope. Trying was always better than acceptance. Wasn’t it? Always?

He went for the living. The loudest first, begging for water. That was the one closest to the stream. Ironic, maybe.

“Please? Water…”

This one was Tammunei’s work. A figure huddled on the streambank’s shale, curled in like a spider in a bottle when a candle’s held to the glass. Short riding-tunic, patched at the sleeves and the back with dappled brown leather. Leather-seated riding trousers and sacklike guarskin boots, tied with straps below the knee. No sign of where a weapon had gone in. Just blood pouring out from under their clothes. It pooled between the stones and sank into the ground, but drained away too slow to stop Simra’s throat from clenching at the reek of it — twisting, making ready to retch. Something had gone wrong inside this one. More than that, Simra didn’t want to know.

He reached into his jacket, finding the hard curl of a knife-handle, in the pocket where it lived inside the blue silk lining. A straight-razor. Sharp, short wedge of blade; curling leaf-stem handle. One-piece forged and sharper than you’d really want to keep any actual weapon — edge so keen it was fragile.

He knelt, careful to avoid the dark slick of blood. Awful, how effortless the blade parted skin from skin. Another weak rush of blood. The ragged gasp of an opened throat. No more words after that. Not from this one.

“’Water,’” Simra echoed in a thin bark, talking because something, sometime, had to be let go. “That’s the fucking problem right there, isn’t it? We stuck by water – drinking water – in a fucking desert of grass! That’s no way to avoid company, is it? That’s one… Point the fucking first…”

Simra’s body muttered dark from a dozen different bruises as he loped from streamside and into the plain. Quick, he found the trail of grass they’d trampled in their false flight. Followed it with jaw set tight, starting now to cramp.

Beyond the bruises – scrambling duck downward; tumbling sidewards dodge – he was unharmed. No spot of skin broken. Just dirt on his hands and knees and hip. He ought to be grateful, so why did it feel like a failing? A way for the guilt to get in.

He found the other body in a wide swathe of flattened grass. Wounded by a bolt from his wand, they were shocked unconscious but still breathing. A stray lock of white hair near their half-open mouth said as much, fluttering in the shallow give-and-take of their breath.

They wore a long coat. Side-fastening, patterned in a broad tangling of shallow sea green, deep sea blue, with rough-tied tassels lining the hems. The fabric bunched and twisted inward at the rider’s flank. The bolt of force had tightened and tunnelled through it, carrying cloth and skin and ribs into the dying mer’s chest. Simra grimaced and started cutting away that section of coat to leave it behind, then pulled the rest of the garment free.

“…And that’d be fine,” he carried on, folding the coat over one arm in a harried violence of motion, “if we’d only fucking hid! Y’know, like we did every other fucking night when nothing fucking happened! Instead? Nah, fucking camp out by the stream, sure we’re in murder-glorious fucking scalp-taker skullshaper territory, but who’s to say it won’t be fine!? Fuck..! That! That right there! That’s two! Point the second!”

By now the guilt was a changing thing: anger one moment, almost panic the next. Simra bent, yanked the Vereansu’s armoured hood aside, and tugged the razor across their throat. The breathing hitched, rasped, and stopped.

Think of it as cleaning up. That was what he’d once been told. It was a partner he’d had that said as much. But Rilva had been a cold bastard; a shaven-headed Dres who fought with a hooked net and a double-ended spear and wouldn’t stop smiling, even at times like this. His advice was about as sickening as everything else about him, and soon enough Simra had stopped listening. Only a little later they’d parted ways. Far as Simra reckoned, neither had missed the other since.

No matter. It had gotten easier over time, with or without Rilva’s help. Only, the ease itself was a hard thing to accept… It wasn’t like in the stories. None of it ever was. But perhaps that was the whole point of the stories. Some lies make living easier.

Simra worked the corpse over, taking what he needed to take. Cleaning up, he thought, grim.

He focused on his breathing, making it deliberate — thinking through every drag and thrust of his lungs likes moves on a chap’thil board. Truth was, all this was harder when he was being watched. Alone it’d only be him that remembered. But when he had Noor and Tammunei nearby – watching maybe – as he pulled a necklace of brass strips from off a new-made corpse? Or as his fingers shuddered clumsy, untying the quiver of arrows from that same dead mer’s hip? Hurried to open the stiffening grip of their right hand to prise away the sword they held?

He shook his head. Wiped clean the blade of his razor on the Vereansu rider’s undershirt. Tried not to look at their face any more than he already had, not wanting to remember it.

He stood and walked back to the yurt.

Tammunei was sitting close to the stream, working handfuls of water through their tangled red hair. Their work-smock was rigid with blood.

“You won’t get that clean,” said Simra, moving to their side but keeping his distance. “Not with anything we’ve got on hand. Trust me, I know…”

Tammunei was silent. They rolled up the sleeves of the smock and started to clean their arms.

“Won’t let you into Ouadabridge if you turn up looking like—…” Simra tailed off. Best not to finish that comparison. His voice hadn’t steadied since shouting before. Only flattened out and gone cold. “Here,” he said, lame-toned, bending to lay down the coat he’d taken. “Get clean, put this on once you are. It’s…uhm…it’s decent work. Not badly made. Hole in it, but I can patch that for you, if you…y’know, if you want. I mean, course you would, why wouldn’t you? Going round with a big hole in the side of your… Yeah…”

Now Simra was silent too. Just the flow of the stream, carrying always on as if it had seen no killing, heard no cries. He raised his left hand, looking at the dead rider’s sword he’d taken.

A rigid scabbard of leather-wrapped wood, stiff rawhide thongs at two points along the length to hang it from a swordbelt. The grip was simple, ridged to fit the fingers of someone who would never hold it again, and riveted round a knifelike full-length tang. The blade itself was long. Perhaps a handstretch longer than Simra’s arm from shoulder to fingernails. Heavy, a slight curve to it, with three rough deep fullers cut along most of its flat. A sword to hack with from horse- or guar-back. Nothing to protect the hand that held it.

“Blight…” Simra cursed under his breath, unhitching his own sword from its belt. “Take this too. Ought to fit fine. Other’s too long, so…”

He dropped it, sheathe and all, onto the folded coat. A short straight single-edged blade with one curt quillon jutting from where the blade and handle met. More like a long knife than anything else. He’d had no great love for it, he told himself. Just worn it since his last had cracked almost clean in two. After that, this had been nearest to hand.

“This’ll suit you better,” he muttered. “Best you have something, right? Before we carry on?”

He unstrapped the belt from the new sword and dropped it beside the old. Tammunei would need something to hang it from but they weren’t getting Simra’s. He’d had the swordbelt he wore longer than he’d owned any one blade. Convenience wouldn’t change that now.

“Thank you,” said Tammunei, colourless and blank. Their sleepwalker’s voice; a dreaming voice. Perhaps it would help them now, slipping into dreams and away from this moment. Simra could only hope so. At least maybe they wouldn’t remember him, fumbling useless for words.

Walking again away from the stream, Simra fastened his own swordbelt through the rawhide loops on the new sword’s scabbard. It hung there now, skewing his weight and gait like before, the same and yet dissimilar. He ought to practice with it. Get used to its feel. Later, he told himself. Now would be too soon.

He found Noor kneeling outside the yurt, sitting on her heels. She looked up at Simra. Maroon eyes beneath the heavy slant of their lids.

“Were those words meant for me? By the stream and out there?”

Simra’s mouth gave an awkward twist. Not a smile, not an answer. Not a greeting either, for him or from her.

“You were right,” she continued. “I brought this down on us. On them too.”

“Should I be sorry too?” Simra ventured. “They were your tribe.”

“I didn’t say I was sorry.”

A hackle of his anger returned at that and turned his next words bitter. “Well, someone has to be. If it’s not me, and it’s not you..?” Simra kissed his teeth. “Explains how Tammu’s feeling, doesn’t it?”

Something flickered anxious across Noor’s impassive face. “No. It doesn’t. Don’t pretend you know otherwise. Or that you understand what she did, or all that she’s done.”

But Simra had gotten the rise he’d wanted. That was enough. A release almost, letting off a little of the bad blood that had filled his mind. “What about them? There anything we ought to do for them?”

“You mean the dead? They knew their options when they chose to fight. They died as Vereansu. We only need to let them lie as they fell. The birds and racers will carry them to their ancestors now.”

Simra suppressed a grimace. “Good to know… Now. Are we gonna have this problem again?”

“As we cross the plains? I think it’d surprise us both if we didn’t. But by night? Is that what you want to know?”

“‘I can make us safe.’ That’s what you said. And instead it fell to me. If it’s gonna happen again, the least favour you can do me is tell me now so I can be ready. So we all can.”

“…It may have to happen again.”

“Why?” Simra snapped. “So you can fucking plant your ghosts as you go? Make plainspeople of all the little townbred ones among them so you can feel right in giving two shits about them? If you’re gonna wring yourself out doing that every night, least you could do’s teach me that hiding spell you do so I can pick up your fucking slack — again!”

Noor fixed him with another stiffer look. “What I’m doing – what I alone among the three of us know how to do – is knowledge that may benefit you in time. That is, if you still want what you wanted from the Grazelands?” An eyebrow rose. “You’d do well not to mock it.”

Simra held her stare a moment, then sighed, hands and head all hanging. “I know… Fuck… I’m sorry. I know it’s not as simple as that, and I know I don’t know a blighted thing about any of it. Just…” He gestured vague onto the plain, where Tammunei and he had run and fought. “Can we go? We should go. Morning already. We’re wasting daylight.”

“Stay a while,” Noor said. “We may yet make back what we lost.”

Tammunei let out a long high trill of song from where they sat on the streambank. It flowed into a murmuring of smoother notes, coaxing, like they used to lure fish into the pot for dinner.

Noor pointed out towards the plains. Simra followed her finger, mouth coming open.

A shape moved through the grass. Two others came trotting towards it, joining it as they moved together towards the stream once more. Two saddle-guars, and the shaggy brown pony whose rider Simra had struck from its back.

“Can you ride?” Noor said.

“…Not my favourite question to be asked,” Simra said.


	12. Chapter 12

_There are places in Old Ebonheart where the dead walk. At the time I didn’t know why. Nor did I question it._

_In Bodram I’d seen weeds and stunted shrubs and loose masonry, and a disarrayed abandon of bones, and the bloodied bodies of the new-made dead, all made to move by ghosts. I’d seen corpses pull and claw and beat at the living til they were corpses too. I’d seen a starveling tree grow roots through a mer from below and crush the life from them with its branches. And I didn’t question it. Not out loud._

_To find Old Ebonheart plagued with undead seemed no great surprise after that._

_But first came the city’s outskirts. Lumberyards gone to worm-feasts, dank breeding fields for bruise-coloured fungi, banquets for foraging scribs. Saltrice terraces swallowed by silt. The lodges and huts of fishermer, collapsed now, their foundations gnawed through by rot._

_Walking once, my half-ruined boots uncovered a glinting rigid something in the sucking mud. It was a Velothi windchime, hollowed from polished bone and preserved in the bog. I picked it up, blacking my already dirt-blacked hands. A long tether of braided twine spooled up from the ground dragging chime after chime from where they’d been hid. But decay and the sudden violence of my curiosity snapped the line. I gathered three of the chimes in a net bag, reckoning to wash them and polish them again._

_“It wasn’t just Nords came to trade here, then,” I said to Tammunei as we carried on. “Velothi too, from off the plains. Leatherwares and bonecrafts. Nix and shalk shells..? Wasn’t aware the Vereansu were known for their crafts.”_

_Tammunei gestured for my attention. I followed their hand as they pointed to one of the Vereansu among us. A warrior, head shaved but for a long grey braid that hung from the back of his scalp. They led a saddle-guar, slow and careful by the reins through these fenlands, too cautious to ride._

_“Herds?” I asked. “Guar and horses?”_

_Tammunei nodded._

_But I looked at the warrior’s bow, unstrung and wrapped in resined soft-leather, against the damage of the damp. The long-hafted axe at their belt, headed like a dagger on one side, like a hammer on the other. “Mercenaries too?”_

_Tammunei tilted their head, gave a small uncertain shift with their mouth, then nodded. A ‘sometimes yes.’ A ‘maybe yes.’_

_With time the land rose. As we dragged ourselves from the marsh, so did the lay of things, and the city-ruin itself._

_We passed through a sunken mess of slums. Sagging once-huts of mud-brick with roofs long gone, opening their insides to the elements, like Nordic barrow-pits. There in the gutter-faced remains of the city’s poorest parts, something lingered on the air. Not a scent, nor quite a sound, but the sense that something was speaking, but couldn’t quite be heard. I wondered if this was how it began for Tammunei, hearing the voices of the dead? But it faded and didn’t come back. And in terraces shored up with stone, tier by tier, we clambered in switchback progress up into the long ridge of headland that crowned Old Ebonheart’s mainland half._

_That was the best part of a day and the beginning, after, of its evening. Cold shade in the morning, as the east-rising steps of this east-rising city hid us from the sun, and the sun from us. Cold sunshine the colour of tin at noon, tricking our brows into beading with sweat._

_Often the old paths were blocked. The upsloping streets were choked with refuse and rubble. We found unorthodox ways over wreckage and terrace-walls, and made our progress something more like the climbing of a mountainside than the navigation of a city. Our path began to wind through alleyways, up the tumbledown flanks of fallen homes, and then through the rooms of homes themselves, preserved somehow like grotto-caves, all but buried in all this destruction._

_Tammunei was first to see the dead. Of course, of course, it was Tammunei. Stealing through a half-collapsed badger-set of rooms where families once had slept, we saw one that still remained._

_A mother and child they’d been once, but death and time had diminished them. In the lightless one-room pit of what had been her home, she paced a figure-eight, holding a bundle of rags in her arms, and the creak and grind of her bones and tendons was all she sang as a lullaby. A faded age-thinned yellow dress hung from her. What flesh she’d worn had turned to leather, parched like the skin of a last-year’s apple, kept since in the dark and the dry. I might have expected skeletons – clattering bones and bleached hard lines – but this was worse. A person whose soul was too shocked or too stubborn to leave their body or quite let it rot._

_We waited, watching, horrified-silent. But it seemed that we were as dead to her as she was dead to us. Trapped in our separate worlds, though we shared a space. She only carried on pacing, rocking her bundle of rags._

_Tammunei urged us onward with gestures of their hands._

_“And you?” I mouthed and motioned, silent by instinct, so as not to disturb this room._

_“I’ll stay,” Tammunei’s lips shaped back. “If there’s something I can do…”_

_“Then I’ll stay with you.”_

_But Tammunei shook their head, firm, hair fretting free and into their face. “Alone. Please.”_

_I frowned, face shifting uneasy, then nodded. “You won’t be long?”_

_A shrug. “Perhaps.”_

_I never knew how much or how little they needed me, then. My protection or help. Mine was the violence that shielded them from violence. Perhaps I was little else besides. This wasn’t a situation to be solved with violence, or well-placed words, but that didn’t mean it was safe. Still I turned away, dour as pulling teeth, and led our long line onward._

_That night we camped in the upper-city, in the dusty tile-strewn square of a tier-roofed townhouse. The shattered shell of a dome lay in the wide weed-choked boulevard outside — scraps of painted bronze and shards of painted purple. I huddled under a colonnade that leant now like a drunkard against an outer wall._

_It was there that Tammunei found us again, and their presence came over us like a broken curse. Purpose and guidance in sight again._

_There was a sweet scent in the air. The splintered pillars of the fallen veranda were of fragrant mauve-brown wood. Slow down the decades they had been bleeding all the while, like cracked bottles of perfume. A dark and oozing aroma, amber-coloured in my mind, and heady to breathe for too long._

_A chill came down with the sunset, and deepened as night drew on. The walls around us blocked the worst of the wind and saved us from its keen cold teeth. Still we heard it, moaning round the severed trunks of fallen towers, adding salt sea to the courtyard’s scent._

_We cooked what was left of our hunters’ meat over stones I called fire to heat. Kagouti is stew meat, unfit to roast save for two exceptions: when roasted a whole day and basted constantly, or when only the cheeks are eaten, for where those hard tusks grow the tenderest meat’s to be found. We had it roasted all the same. We had weathered worse things than chewing tough meat. Or meat burnt almost black…_

_I asked Tammunei what they had done below. Had they been able to help?_

_“I listened to her sing,” they mouthed to me. “Heard her. Said her child was sleeping. And she slept sound after that.”_

_Strange. Tammunei always spoke of the uncanny as if it were the most natural thing. As if anyone could do the same, and anyone in their right heart would._

_After, we huddled round the stones, starving and greedy for what remained of their warmth. In bedrolls and bundles of clothing and rags, and in heapings of travel-tired limbs, we stockpiled the heat of our bodies._

_This had all turned to habit by then. Every night, and every night, as the nights themselves grew colder. And every night that passed that way, I spent trying not to breathe, thinking of nothing but sleep. Useless — like praying so hard for a thing that you never get up off your knees to go out and get it._

_That night, Tammunei’s shape furled over me. Some bone-rigid part nestled into me. Chin to chest, jaw to shoulder; a tangle of knees and elbows. Warmth worked between us, trapped in the folds of our clothes. I thought about breathing. Counted every conscious twitch of my lungs._

_Touch had never come easy to me. Ever a kind of invasion at worst, and at best it stuck like a burr in my mind so I could think of nothing else — like I’m bound up too tight in the skin that’s doing the feeling. And there was always guilt in that too._

_With Tammunei it had stopped feeling like an affront, an assault. Hard to say when the change had come, or if it had always been there. But with them I suffered touch without suffering. And at the time that felt so precious it scared me. So sweet that to sleep through it would be a waste, some part of me almost felt. So it had felt for weeks maybe, and I’d gone the whole while without rest._

_Our bodies were tangled. I felt their shivers through me, as if they were my own._

_“You’re shivering,” I said, soft and stupid, unheard in the dark. But I was used to telling Tammunei what they felt. Telling the truths their nerves wouldn’t report. By now, that too was habit._

_How could they be cold, I wondered? How, while my skin prickled so hot? While my breath and my blood both came so fevered?_

_The coarse grind of clothes on clothes. A sound like knots tied in rope, made fast, making mooring, tightening round me. Everything came world-resounding loud when the cold and the city-ruin had made everything else so silent. The closeness of it all trapped me, bound up in all this sharing. The terror of it and hunger of it, febrid-hot in my hungry hands, and tugging tight in my coward heart._

_In my belly I felt the moment uncurl. A blossoming brute desire. I laid a hand on Tammunei’s hip. A question, but they had no voice to answer. In the silence, I hated that I’d asked at all._

_The cold of the morning made that night feel distant as a dream. That was a mercy, but not a reprieve._


	13. Chapter 13

_A bright lay of frost mazed over the morning. Patterns of rime like Evermore lace, on the pavestones, the roof tiles, the tiles fallen and littering the floor. Alike came our breath and the steam from our cookpots: white clouds, thick and clinging, aflow like long hair drowned in deep water._

_Faces and fingers – each inch of bare skin – greased and glossy against the cold, the Vereansu massed round one pot, mouths silent with chewing. They had smoke-dried meat left yet for the eating, dry and black as tree-bark, but enough to carry them on. And last night they might have dried more, and shored up all our supplies, but the smoke would’ve risked too much in this place, and there was little wood to burn._

_The half-hollowed frame of the kagouti they’d caught lay by like a sack of stones, hide stiff from the nighttime cold. Waste, the rest of the meat on its bones, freeze-blistered and left behind._

_By another pot crowded the settled mer. More used to getting their warmth from walls and hearths and the comfort of home in these cold months, they huddled closer together. Complained more, as if by speaking their grievances they could put them outside themselves. An urge that I of all people ought to understand — ought not to mock._

_I wondered: How many of them had come from warmer kinder climes? Cyrodiil or the Southern Deshaan? And for what but a dream of Vvardenfell, baiting the lines by which they’d hooked themselves, and now could not get free. To leave Skyrim for this, I could understand. At least here the cold brought no snow. But I wondered at their stories, and what made home so hopeless to them, or the hopes that lay here that much brighter. And I wondered at times what had ever set me hoping my own hopes, so strange-similar to theirs?_

_Our outcasts too were scattered about, throughout our courtyard camp. Pilgrims and pariahs, jangling with chimes as they moved._

_For the same reason we’d risked no fire last night, I hated the sound of every move they made, and every voice raised more than a murmur. We’d seen the walking dead in these ruins, but what worried me worse were the living. I’d had inklings grim as omens since arriving in the outskirts. If I had any sense for these things, I knew the kinds of life an empty once-great city would attract. What such a place would shelter and swarm with and let to thrive unchecked. In hindsight, I proved a better judge in that than in almost anything else of the time. In all but one case, my instincts were better than my choices by far…_

_Vex me though they might, though – these holymer in ash and blue – I had more in common with them at times than with either the settlers or the clansmer. Set apart and restless; single-minded and hollow with purpose. I crouched at the edges of things, filled with nothing but waiting, blank as a dog while its master has no use of it. They might have pretended to pray, or lose themselves in trances, but one way or another they did as I did — watching Tammunei, impatient with all our false patience._

_Hair hued like a bloodclot in a bowl of milk, and tangled as the wildest of brambles, Tammunei sat in a crumple of legs on a broad and fallen pillar. Their face was a mask even I couldn’t parse, their robes slate blue and dust-marked._

_I kept my distance. From the others, yes, but from Tammunei most of all. I trusted myself to go no closer. Not after last night. Not until I was called, and could hide once more behind what was required of me — what I was required to be._

_Better by far to be that and no more for now. Simpler by leagues and leagues. A voice that spoke to strangers so that Tammunei could stay safe in their silence. A throat that turned their silence to shouts when loudness was all that would do. A violence let loose on command. Setter of fires and heater of stones… When had I last been anything else, to anyone, even myself? Not with the Vahn, and scarcely since after. Only in moments that shamed me, then set me back in my place._

_But when Tammunei eyed and beckoned me over, those moments crowded in. And I remembered beneath Bodram, when I told them my true name, and tried as best I could to be no-one but myself. And I remembered other things too. The texture of their robe beneath my fingertips; the sound its weave made against the clothes I wore. A moment wrapped in sound and warm sensation where I’d let myself want, and hope to want no more. A moment’s lapse, the bare length of a blink, but it soured me to myself all the same. An old guilt made new and strange._

_That’s the issue with moments. We talk of the past in was and were, and in terms of what used to be. We tell tales almost as I do now, watching them through the eye of an hourglass, looking over the sands that’ve already passed. But that’s not how memory works. The pasts we keep inside ourselves are presents, whole and contained. And when a moment rises up and takes hold, it’s not a story in the telling, but a turn of the hourglass over again, and one’s mind trapped in the eye of it, while the sands tumble scouring over us, one now overlaying another._

_I swallowed it. Texture, tenderness, terror. The scent of their breath and their hair. Best as I could, I buried it all, and was what was asked of me._

_I stood by the pillar where Tammunei sat. Waited to read in their face what they had to say. But they tilted their chin, showing a smooth line of throat, up from the sea-green waves of their patterned scarf. And they beckoned me closer, and spoke. Spoke aloud._

_“We’re starving.” An unpractised creak of voice. “We don’t feel it yet – not while we have food – but it’s started…”_

_Like a traveller on the frozen sea whose boat’s broken in by some iceberg unseen, and who sees now the whole floor of his little wooden world ruptured as the water searches inward about his feet. Like a sailor surprised on the frozen sea as his ship becomes a wreck, I listened to Tammunei speak. A whisper and nothing more, but the two-weeks of silence that had come before rang it all but deafening through me. An amazement that edged onto horror. I swallowed it._

_“Hard to see it coming when there’s grain still in every pot,” I agreed, flat. “No-one wants to think how the meal that fills their belly today has emptied their forage-sack for tomorrow. Not while there’s meat yet between their teeth.” I aped their whisper, whispering too._

_Foraging had been good while we crossed the plains, and better across the delta – hunting too – but both had been poor since we came to the city-ruins. Sundered stone and stirless dust, it yielded up only nettles, black and grey and dark green weeds, corners of wild mushrooms in places gathered with damp. They’ll supplement one’s staples, but otherwise only stretch thin the hunger you feel — never sate it. That was what Tammunei meant. The starting pangs of how we’d starve as we crossed on and into Vvardenfell._

_“The Vereansu are plains mer,” said Tammunei. “They fed us on the plains, as they knew how. We’re in the city now, Simra, or what was a city.”_

_“And I’m a city mer?”_

_Tammunei nodded._

_I had questions. City mer — if that’s what I was then so too were any number of the other settled mer in our line. Those from Cheydinhal, Blacklight, the Imperial City. Merchants and artisans and labourers, one for every farmer or prospector. What made Tammunei think we knew any way of feeding ourselves and our own besides buying or begging? What good was that amongst a dead city’s bones?_

_But I blinked my understanding, knowing what Tammunei had meant, though unsure as to how they’d known it. I was of a different sort from the others. We both knew the Grey Quarter did that to those raised in its depths. But perhaps what I’d said of the docks had set Tammunei thinking too._

_“Give me a half-handful of the others,” I said. “Muscle for heavy carrying or dealing with worse, whatever’s more needful.”_

_“Ask. Take them. They know you speak for me.”_

_Tammunei gave a shy smile. Being followed and obeyed still sat strange with them. It sat little worse with me, but I showed my apprehension subtler._

_Now you can speak for yourself, I thought. Who says I speak for you still? But all I voiced was: “I’ll see what can be done.”_

_And things were simple. And I was again what was needed of me, though what was needed had changed. In the madness that carried us all by then, that day it felt like enough._


	14. Chapter 14

_From the length of our line, I chose my help. Picked them one by one, and all the response any gave was a curt recognition that, yes, they would follow where I led._

_The settled mer nodded. The one Vereansu I chose raised a hand to touch with two fingertips light between his brows. Not quite an equivalent gesture, I’d learnt. It suggests not assent or agreement, but submission between equals. And in that tilt of the head and touch of the hand was the whole dynamic at work. I was no more than any among them – had won them neither by rank nor any show of strength – but still I had their trust. A surrogate then, for the blind and blinding faith they’d heaved onto Tammunei’s shoulders._

_Shurfa was a Dunmer woman gone already into the afternoon of her life. The long setting-sun-years that begin, for most mer with any luck at all, around their fortieth Winter and may stretch, as their luck stretches on, into the end of their life’s first century. In their youth, it’s said and widely found, a mer will spend their days following, or at least resisting, an urge to wander. Come mid-life another urge will set in slow but strong as time itself: a desire to settle and stitch roots through the world._

_Shurfa, I would say, was well into her seventies. Softness gone from her features, her elf-sharp bones showed clear through. Strange then that in the time most mer would feel the call to establish something solid and lasting, she had unpicked and put behind her every loose end of her life before, and joined up with the caravan to Vvardenfell._

_She had been with us since Garanmorad, in the highlands of the Redoran West. But for all she’d lived on Redoran ground her whole life long, she was one of the many who lived at Redoran sufferance but beneath Redoran notice. For the way House Redoran sees and wants the world is a narrow and rigid vision — just as anyone’s sight is likely to be when viewed through the slits of their helmet._

_Honour unto all, they say, who keep to the duties of their caste. By doing so, they bring honour and benefit to the kinline; by doing so, the kinline brings honour and benefit upon them. So too the kinlines benefit and benefit from the House itself. Honour unto the warrior caste, dutybound to protect those beneath them. Honour unto the farmers, dutybound to work the land and feed those above them, and themselves, likely in that order of importance. Honour unto the scribes, dutybound to oversee the warriors above and the farmers below, and to manage and record the service and self-sacrifice of each on behalf of the other. Honour too unto artisans of any clean craft, so long as they are sworn to the service of a kinline. So be it that they will prosper in times of plenty, and be protected in times of scarcity and strife._

_Those outside this system are hangers on and parasites. Outcastes without honour, whose existence – or necessity to the existence of their supposed betters – is not admitted by caste Redoran. Beggar and merchant, miner and tanner, all these and more are outcastes alike. Granted nothing by the House that rules the lands of their birth, an outcaste must make their own way. And so Shurfa had, all her life, in the lands up and down the River Taldas._

_Ploughshare and paddy and egg-miner’s mattock had given her the hard broad shape of an Erabenimsun wrestler. It was this perhaps that had made her a loan-lender’s enforcer in Garanmorad, and the thankless thumb-breaking of that work which led her to turn pioneer and set her sights on Vvardenfell, old lands, and new life. For her by now, I suppose there was no gain or promise in turning back to lands under Redoran rule. Only formless hope ahead._

_She was thin-faced, small round the eyes, with brow and cheeks beginning to ridge and line. Stocky by merish standards, solid at the waist, sturdy-built at the shoulders, and all imposing-tall. Her legs were swathed loose in skirtlike pants, light tan but with patterns pricked out red in spots of dye. They gathered at the ankles and led into two-toed shoes with sandal-soles of wood. On top, a vest of kreshweave, and a shapeless patchy jacket of thick dust-coloured leather, folding halter-fashion upon and around itself at the neck. Like a traveller’s staff she carried an iron-shod longclub, its business end all studs and rivets, rings and bands._

_Her, I had chosen for her strength, and what I reckoned might be a knack for finding hidden things, remainder from her enforcer days. Balambal, next of the three, I chose from among the Vereansu hunters, for eyes and ears keen over distances, and a game-stalker’s soft-soled step._

_Where Shurfa was big and solid as brickwork, Balambal loped catlike through life, lax and river-smooth in all his motions. His body was a bowstring, slim and supple, but the right cause could stretch him out, and by long calm tension bring sudden power to bear. In short, a small and spare-built fetcher with an archer’s asymmetry in his shoulders, a wood-and-bone recurved bow wrapped loving as a babe in oiled leathers at his side, and a wicked-curved rider’s sabre slung below it._

_His hair was worn Vereansu fashion. A scalp shaved smooth to show the shape of the skull – changed and elongated with magic and wet-and-dry leather while still in soft-boned infancy – save for a long and careful-kept braid hanging down from the back of the crown._

_He had been among those who lost sisters and brothers to Tammunei at Bodram. One of those whose sworn kin I myself had killed. I’d nicked and blunted my blade past use on their weapons, their armour, their bones – a sword I’d had since the Rift and left behind with a bitter heart – and by now carried one I’d taken from among the dead of that day._

_A long straight double-edged blade, nimble at its spearhead point and with a shallow ridge all down its length. A kind of crescent moon curved forward from a small dish at the blade’s root, and together formed a guard for the hand. The grip itself was braided sweat-stained silk over layers of flesh-soft leather, moulding with time to the wearer’s palm and fingers. Enough room for a hand and a half, and then a smooth-cornered diamond pommel with a faded roughsilk tassel in burnt orange._

_My point is that this was no Vereansu work, but the spoils of Vereansu raiding. A Hlaalu blade, I later learnt to reckon, and a key hint to another skill amongst the Vereansu, beyond bow and saddle and stirrup. A tribe of raiders all across the plains of the Northern Deshaan, Vereansu ought to be well-versed as any loan-lender’s bailiff at sensing out stores and supplies._

_Balambal reckoned himself one of the better looters amongst those left of his warband. If the whispering settled-mer silks he wore beneath his padded leather riding-coat told any truths of their own, I was inclined to believe him. But beyond that, my Velothis then was too barebones to make complex sense of their dialect. I found out little else about him save what I could tell by sight. Never where he’d been raised or what deeds he’d done before. Never what fine-drawn line between Vereansu blood-vengeance and blood-debt led him and the other Vereansu survivors of our number to take up with Tammunei, rather than flee, or in fury avenge their fallen. Only, his feelings seemed drawn two ways over Tammunei asking this of us:_

_“The wise-one makes us reavers again. I’m glad. But with neither banner or bloodshed..?” He kissed his teeth. “We Vereansu are wolves. Picking the bones of a stranger’s kill? This wastes what we are.”_

_I responded in my own Velothis, hoping it would translate. I was thankful at least he’d given me words to work with — an image to turn back on him. “The wise-one knows this: in Winter, wolves will eat what they can find or else go hungry. You’d know it too, if you had any wisdom in you.”_

_His only response was the same gesture as before. He touched his forehead and was silent._

_Medis was last of the three. A soft-faced priest of the New Temple with a smooth orator’s voice. Young – an initiate – and with what must therefore have been a lifetime’s growth of long pale hair in a high and plaited queue, rising up from his head then down his back. Heavy-hemmed eyes and skin dark-sheened like polished basalt._

_To some long first extent, I took him on to round out my three, and make my foraging party seem neither to spare or favour any one group. Shurfa from the settlers; Balambal from the Vereansu; Medis from the pilgrims. Were it not for that, I might not have chosen them. Something hung round the young priest that set me ill at ease. Faith or Temple manners, perhaps, or something harder to place…_

_But with Tammunei carrying on to islandside Ebonheart, separate from us until we regrouped at the crossing, I’d take no chances with the city’s undead. Medis was how I tried to prepare._


	15. Chapter 15

_Our first outing came off fair enough. That was my first command, and to date the only time that others have been put under my lead and the matter has ended in anything else but a mess._

_In the Summer of that year, I fought in the Rift. I was one sellsword among the many bought up by Ulfric Stormcloak and spent in his war on the Rift’s great plain, or else in its hills, or before the walls of Riften, and the shores of Lake Honnrich. I fought for spoils and a half-year’s salary, beneath the banner of a company calling itself the Red Vahn._

_Still I was seldom in the line of battle. Mine was a war fought in skirmishes, amongst the horseclans of that hold, winning the support of one by helping it to vengeance against another. There were times our small band of warriors steered close to democracy in choosing its paths and approaches. But always we were in the hands of others: bound to their beck and corralled in by every new problem put to us._

_Even when my word was heeded – even when my plans opened the gates of Weeping-Cloud Hall, or helped to hold its palisade walls against the clan that named it – I never felt in control of myself, my fate, or my future. Less still the fates of others._

_Now, in that same year’s deep Winter days, I led a forage party. My nineteenth Signing Day had passed by unannounced, in those first stirrings of the Thief’s season. I had less life behind me than even Medis, youngest of my three followers. Still they followed me through the ruin of Old Ebonheart. Heeded my words and bent to my will. And every hour they did so, I lived in terror of myself._

_I recalled my commander in the Red Vahn, and wondered how he’d seemed so at ease with this weight on him — more than followed Tammunei and ten times as many souls as I had yoked to my lead._

_While Tammunei led our people through the mainland side of the city, to encamp at the long-bridge’s beginning, I led my forage party through this first half of Ebonheart. In part I was glad for the time away from Tammunei, and that worried me, but never so much as the part of me that hated the separation with every uncertain beat of my heart. Two days in total. A little less perhaps. In that time we stole enough from starvation’s lap to feed what was left of our expedition for perhaps another week. And that was enough to hope on._

_Salt-fish from a half-buried store in the southern docks, potent-smelling but not yet rotten. Black sugar and flasks of ancient mazte, grown strong and characterful with age, from what might have been a smuggler’s cache._

_We checked the great silo-pits of what I reckoned to be a grain-seller’s guild along the high causeway. Empty but for dust, we found them — looted by scavengers earlier than us._

_Instead we contented ourselves with the slim pickings of the slim chances we took on empty homes in poorer parts of the city. The more meagre the promise of a place, I thought, the less likely it was to have already been bled dry. So from a handful of larders and store-cellars in scores of homes, we found rice, oil, salt, and preshta preserves in stoneware jars._

_To our hungry bellies, this paucity seemed like plenty. The lack of spoilage alone was amazing. But it came down, I suppose, to how much of the lower city was packed dry into pods of set ocean silt, or falls of ash. And the Vvardenfell Dunmer, and those on the mainland coasts of the Inner Sea have long kept produce close to fresh by tombing it in ash. So it was with so many of the homes we split open. Air closed-in, stale, and kept sacred to itself for almost two centuries. It kept the contents dry and inert, if never quite good as new._

_The dead we found on our sweep through the city were placid and detached. Shambling things locked in cycles of motion. No mind or will to speak of but the habits graven into their bones. We did what we could to ignore them and so they stayed blind to us._

_It was only in one buried home we broke open that the dead saw us and found something to hate. One corpse, dessicated as the spoils we hoped to find, staring eyeless up at us from the floor of a bone-strewn room. Fast, mad, moving more like a beast than the elf it had been._

_I remember the light it gave out as it burnt and kept thrashing, reaching out with scything groping bone-clawed hands. It blazed bright for its body was dry as kindling. I saw its shape, scarred onto the insides of my eyelids for days to come thereafter. But it was Shurfa crushed it into a corner and broke the bones it was made on with her longclub._

_We combed through the hovel after that. Nothing. Folk had starved this place empty then starved in it themselves, long before we came and tried to do the same. Nothing but the other bones – broken open as if to get at the marrow – littering the floor of that single room. Just the time-thinned rags of a family’s clothes and the dusty tatters of their bedding. Just a carved soapstone idol, fallen from a hopeless wallshrine — or was it a child’s doll? Splinters of furniture; broken ceramics. Nothing but bad memories the world had walled up and forgot._

_Still we found proof there was still meat to be picked from Old Ebonheart’s bones. Little enough, all in all, but on our return it felt like a triumph worth feasting over. Instead, on the outsparred square before the stone bridge, we had only rice and saltfish and sour-potent preshta-lo – all three older than almost every one amongst us – and we roistered over the three like they were lavishments and bounty._

_For one night we were reckless and gleeful in what we had. Like gamblers come good on the night’s last fall of the bones, who know to be merry as they may for the losses tomorrow might bring. We rationed the rest for days to come, and crossed the bridge in the morning._

_Old Ebonheart was a city of two halves, even before Lie Rock fell, and the Red Year laid it waste._

_On its mainland side is a curling peninsula, angling gradual up to the slopes of a high headland. That headland rises from the saltwater swamp of the slums that the city’s Argonians once called home. We had passed through those same swamps and slums from the west. Their brackish mud had sucked at our boots and their salt still tidemarked all that we wore. But the headland itself is a long cropping of stone, cresting northward along the peninsula’s eastern edge, then jutting out into the thin strait that divides the city’s halves. All along its rise a wide causeway runs, north to south and lined with fallen statues, guildhalls, the deep caves of covered markets, and shrines half-buried in silt homesick for the sea. A bridge reaches out from its northmost tip, and spans toward islandside Ebonheart._

_The bridge is a wondrous monstrous thing, little more than three armspans wide across most of its length, but sat high on sturdy pilings of solid-cut stone. It withstood the Red Year’s tidal waves and tremors. Whether by engineer or enchanter’s skill, it stands to this day — strewn with refuse from the Red Year’s risen sea and slimed with ocean-weeds gone long to rot, but still intact._

_Beyond it stands the citadel. The upper city. High black walls looking to landward still stand up from the cliffs across half the island. Beyond, the spires and compounds of the rich and noble and holy, while the walls’ tall keeps guard them._

_A persimmon coloured dawn smiled wide from east to west. Wide the sky as it overbridged us, walking our own narrow bridge. Wide the sky and open-mouthed, and cold the beating wind._

_I wore my sleeping-skin around me, wrapped and wrapped like a cloak above my mantle, my sister’s jacket, my loose old Grey Quarter kurta and broider-hemmed Riftfolk shirt. The high crying wind on this high skinny bridge set every fold of me flapping like wings. And when it picked up I feared they’d set me flying, aglide over the parapet and into the white-maned sea far below._

_It parched what little skin I had exposed. Gloveless, I hid my hands in my clothing. My cheeks had already forgotten what it was to feel anything at all. Lipless numb my mouth; at ache the teeth behind._

_The brittle sun did nothing now to fade the dawning frost. Our steps were small and caretaken along the ice-treacherous stones._

_Four hundred short paces from root to mooring spanned the bridge’s length. I counted them, knowing if my footing got too confident – too automatic – that was when it would fail me. But in four hundred short paces, the citadel’s gatehouse loomed before us, then overhung us, and set us aslant in its shadow._

_It was a triangle gap of yawning stone, fanged on its two longest sides with leaf-shaped ins of stone. A waiting grate of rust and wrought iron fell down its height, guarding jealous the courtyard beyond._

_“Footholds and handholds,” I said, turning back at the haggard and wind-harried line that had followed Tammunei and I across the bridge. I pointed at the grate. “Whole thing’s practically a ladder. Less anyone’s got any brighter ideas, I say we climb it.”_

_I waited for brighter ideas. Grim silent faces and shuffling feet. No objections._

_“Good,” I said. “Who’s got rope?”_

_The grate was four or perhaps five times my height. At the peak of its triangular gateway, another man-high reach of wall crested up before the zig-zag cops of its battlement. But the Grey Quarter is a gorge – a pit – and one of the first things any urchin learns after they’ve learnt to walk is how to climb out from it, onto Windhelm’s roofs and flying gutters, to get beneath the sky. Being raised within it had made a passing climber of me, and experience told me that stretch of flat stone at the gatehouse’s highest point would be the whole climb’s hardest part._

_We knotted together what rope we had. Braided coarse woodbast, snatches of rough silk; horsehair, scalp hair, rough woven cord. On and on til what we’d gathered would outlength the height of what lay before us. We might have made a griphook, but a Vereansu stepped forward, clever with a lasso, and in three tries had looped the rope’s far end around one jagged wall-cop._

_I looked at Tammunei but they looked back with urging in their eyes. Still my turn to speak, then._

_“Those that can climb go first. Those less able, we’ll pull you up after, soon as we’ve strength enough to do it. All of you waiting, keep your hands warm whatever way you can. You’ll want feeling in them for this…”_

_And hand over hand, feet hooking into the grate like a wall-trellis, I went up. Out from my clothes, my hands turned raw, then hotly sore, then numbed down solid as I reached the gateway’s crest._

_“Blight…” I muttered. My breath puffed out as steam._

_Now came the difficulty. I hooked up a scrabbling foot onto the cornice that edged the gateway. A sloping thing, hard to win purchase. Better to have taken off my boots, I thought — to have frozen my feet for what grip they’d get me. Better that than falling. Too late now. Gripping the rope in both hands, I crabbed along the angled cornice til I reached its absolute peak. After that I shuffled til I was footed against the wall on a perpendicular and with firm-planted steps I walked my way up._

_A final lurch. I saw rather than felt my cold-numb hand latch onto the wall-cop. With a wrenching heave I was over, slumped on my side on the wall’s flat top. Aching shoulders and plaintive hands and belly tight with nerves and knotting, but I was over. I caught my breath and signalled down for the next climber to come._

_On the gatehouse top I turned, and saw what lay ahead._

_The gatehouse was a hollow square, walled all about then stepping down onto the walls that straddled the island’s cliffs to either side. Its inside plummeted down like the wide mouth of a well, towards the same sight we’d seen through the diamond gaps in the iron grate._

_Dark weeds struggled up from a gritted floor, cast all in shadow by the sidelong sun. Wasted outlines lay snared in the undergrowth, grown over and through with mushrooms that crowded white all upon each other like soapsuds, flecked with red. Rotten clothing, bonemold bleached by near two hundred years of noonday suns. Bodies beginning to shift, as if in all this cold they’d sensed our coming warmth._

_Here in the citadel, more than in any home we’d broken open throughout the lower city, we were trespassers._

_“Fighters up next and be ready!” I called down the wallside, holding my nerve by a thread._

_“Corpsewalkers?” a settler asked from below._

_“Yes, blast and blight it, up, up!”_

_Beyond the gatehouse, and the mainland wall, a straggling hedge of spires stood still, aglint in the morning or dark against the sky. But below more bodies were moving, writhing apart from each other, worming unnatural to remember themselves._

_I watched a shape of rags and bones, defined more by the scant plates of its dull pale armour, haul itself to an upright hunch with its tall towershield for a crutch. It stared up at me from within the mouldered tatters of what had been a padded jacket._

_Still others struggled against each other and yanked their limbs apart. Sin-skinny figures without armour or weapons that crawled not for the stair-towers to the battlements, but towards the grate itself. Shambling things, all pressing to stand, lumpen with fungus or tangled in weeds. A wave of clawing groping hands. When built on nothing but bone and bowstring-bandy sinew, all hands turn to talons in the end._

_“Tammunei?!” I yelped to the open air._

_Fear froze then thawed me. I rushed along the walltop, sword drawn now and gleaming. Icy footing forgotten, I hurried to block the entrance to one stair-tower. I had enough brave stupidity for that, but not enough to look below, at the corpses crowding from the courtyard to surge like screaming steam from a kettle into the tower itself._

_I yanked my wand from its place in my boot. Swore as I tried to remember what charge it might have left. Had I loosed one or two shots in my panic at the corpsewalker we’d come across in that half-buried lower city hovel?_

_“Idiot..! Idiot..!”_

_A shambling guard lurched up the steps. Slow at first, these dead things, but gaining awful momentum as they go. It lunged for me, barrelling forward with its towershield._

_My breath caught in a hiss. Panic as I fired from the hip. Wasted a shot that turned out to be my last, to crack and snarl the riveted bonemold plates of the shield._

_“Stupid..!”_

_I was barking, snapping at myself as I turned aside from the lumbering charge. A blinkered moment of struggling motion. Something raked at me from behind the shield. I dropped sword and wand and heaved, toppling the walker over the parapet. Had it had all the meat-and-guts weight of a person I would never have hoped to throw it, but here it was nothing but bone and the heft of its armour. What weight it had sent it crashing onto the lower wall’s edge, then down to cliff and sea, unseen._

_I dropped and grabbed my wand, stashing it in one boot. I searched and snatched up my sword and thrust into the tower doorway, up from the ground. An idiot instinct. What makes a weapon’s point lethal in the long of things when used against the living is the very same thing that makes it next to useless against the dead. The next corpseguard creaked and grated down the length of my blade from where I’d buried it deep in the cloth and rot of its belly. In a hungry reach of limbs it was stopped at the hilt and all but upon me, arms around me, in a confusion of trying to claw and crush both at once._

_Screaming, I gave it ground. Stepped back as it advanced. I remember its face close to mine, clattering against itself, mostly jaw and empty eyes. I remember the dry dust and damp rank cloth reek of it, rolling over me. I remember setting a desperate hand to its mailfronted jacket and screeching the cruellest calling words I could._

_A heat that singed my eyebrows. Hot metal that scorched my palm. But most of all, force and fury, and withering wavering air. No flames save the embers of cloth and the parchment that had been its skin. In a shower of sparks and cinders, the corpse burst backwards and into pieces, freeing my soot-blacked blade._

_“Other tower!” I cried out to anyone else on the wall, praying that there was anyone else on the wall._

_My voice was already heat-scourged hoarse, my throat gone dry as ashes. My body felt wrung and emptied out from what force I’d pleaded out from my muscles and the flame I’d screamed out in my terror._

_I pictured how oil burns, liquid and clinging, and called it out from my raw-burnt hand. The sickly gout of soft wet flame sprang shortlived down the tower’s inside. Scrabbling frantic motion from below. Clicks and clawing on stone steps and walls. But the light and warmth were shortlived with little to give them life. Nothing within me and little without. The loss of my last magicka struck half a moment later like a kick to the gut, doubling me over, almost retching._

_It was then I heard a song, like a shimmer on the air. A voice I knew but hadn’t heard like this since Bodram. Tammunei wove a wordless spell and the dead were still once more. Resting or destroyed, it was always hard to say._


	16. Chapter 16

Words turned in Simra’s mind. Words turned and worked themselves over.

The gait of his shaggy-maned mud-brown pony almost made a poem of them. The gentle jolt through the hips, the floor of his body, and out into travel-vexed thighs. An abdomen sick of bending to keep sitting a saddle. The muffled knocking that beat through his spine and set his neck to aching. That was its metre. It was also three-fifths of what he hated about riding.

No denying though, it had halved the second half of their journey. This leg of it, at the least. They had ridden along the nameless stream til it paid out into the Dathan. A wide pale-watered river, but it sat shallow and flowed slow between its deeper sloping banks. That was one thing for which they could thank the coming Winter. Mountain headwaters, back to the west — they’d be lying cold and lazy now, in mountains already gone bleak with frost, bleached with snow.

Simra was wary of river-crossings. Had any number of reasons to be, and most of them good ones too. But crossing the Dathan at the ford they found was scarce enough to wet Simra’s boots, or wash against the ribs of his pony. No great trial, he told himself, as his heart clenched and the eyes behind his eyes remembered. And then they were over.

They dismounted to let the guar bask a moment in the cool bright sun, and the pony roll dry in the grass and the dust. They ate mouthfuls of wood-dark bark-stiff jerky from the saddlebags of the dead Vereansu.

Simra’s stomach still took uneasy to treating meat as a staple not a luxury. It growled and fidgetted, unquiet as they rode on.

In the nights, the mornings, and what stops they took to water and rest their mounts, Simra found time to write. He’d folded the parchment he bought in Bodram til he could see pages in each crumpled gather. Not a book nor quite a scroll, but he numbered each page as he wrote, planning for the day when he’d refold and cut and stitch the whole mess together — make it what it was meant to be.

Sixteenth months with no way to write, then thirteen more with scarce any time to do so — not like this, not for himself. The habit came back hard – harder on some days than others – but the one thing more bitter than writing badly was not writing at all. And all the rest was a chaos of peaks and pits, and misbegot conclusions. One day it would seem that, in silence, he’d somehow gotten better. The next, it seemed neglect had lost him whatever scraps of skill or talent he’d once had.

But the habit was there now, at root and at work. Even without paper or ink, in empty times, some part of his mind would start writing. Words turned. Words turned and worked themselves over.

Simra rode with Tammunei to his left.

His was a hunched shape, low and sloped in the saddle, contrasting the long straight spear slung across his back.

He’d taken the spear from among the fallen Vereansu, who had used it for both a lance and bannerpole. A shaft of reddish-dark wood with a strange and twisting grain, a little longer than Simra was tall, wrapped in leather at the middle and bored with holes at either end to take a carrying strap. Its point was a narrow taper of iron with a second straight spike hooking backwards off from it.

It rattled against his saddle, shoulders, and side as he went. A blighted inconvenience and a sly cruel reminder. Useful, no doubting that, but he’d told himself that he’d never rely on another blighted spear again as long as he lived. Not after all he’d done for the chance to make it so. So don’t rely on it, he told himself now. Use it when it suits you, and don’t when it doesn’t. Sell it when you get the chance for all you give a shit. Still, it felt like an indignity. Another piss poor joke the world was playing at his expense.

Noor went ahead of Simra and Tammunei on her grey and tan guar, the ambling point to their formation. She’d taken a bow from the Vereansu dead and it nestled unstrung, like a little horned moon, at rest in a sheathe by her saddle. Arrows rattled in a nearby quiver. Short and light and softish-spoken, fletched to bring down prey. Longer and heavy, fewer in number, three war-arrows grumbled in their separate compartment. Her long hair streamed idle behind, more wind than speed in its motion.

She sat her saddle upright. Flowed somehow with the jerking two-foot gait of her guar. Flowed somehow with the way its walk veered side to side with every step, as much as it rambled forward.

All motion on two legs is falling, Simra decided. Falling and catching, falling and catching. The kind of thing that if you ever thought about, instead of doing it thoughtless, you’d fail or falter in it — fail the fall, miss the catch.

A steppe-pony was a smoother ride – a more familiar one for Simra – but that didn’t make it a far cry better. Noor was maddening-perfect in the way she rode. Tammunei, natural and smooth, clicking and cooing to their guar all the while. Simra found it easier to slouch. He’d never be mistaken for a good rider. The next best thing was to be a poor but comfortable one, he reckoned. Not that there was any blighted danger of that. He could urge a fair smooth Riftfolk tolt from a horse like this, but any pace slower or faster would jar him. Most of their journey went on at a grating walk, while Simra fought to keep a mouthful of complaints behind his teeth.

The shadow of something winged hung black in the sky.

“One of yours?” Simra pointed it out to Tammunei. “Hired on to catch us dinner?” He’d seen Tammunei sing a hawk from off its glide and down to catch them a hare. Hoped this might be the same.

Tammunei gave a vague smile and shook their head. “I’m listening to the ground, not asking favours of the sky.”

“Alright…”

For all the haze and mystery when Tammunei talked of their magic, the aim was often practical, the goal a fish or scrib or marmot for the pot, or some sense of nearby water. Simra waited for Tammunei to explain.

“I can hear mushrooms,” they said. “Not far. Hiding in the tall grass. We might have missed them otherwise…”

“What does a mushroom sound like?”

“One mushroom? Don’t know. Too quiet. But lots? It’s… Hm… One thing, lots of voices, lots of senses, all talking to each other, but — No. Talking to itself. Like — Like if a spider’s web could talk, strand to strand, corner to join, then…it might talk like this.”

Simra raised his brows, slackened his jaw. He was never sure whether to be amazed or appalled.

“But…you don’t know? Because you’ve never heard a cobweb before?”

Tammunei smiled again. Remembered to nod.

“Fucking Princes…” Simra breathed. A soft curse that turned into a laugh. “Swear, if I could write like you talk…” Even after the laugh had ended, Simra felt a lingering smile twist his scarred lips.

The mushrooms weren’t far, only hidden.

Tammunei made a cooing noise and turned off their course, leaving Simra unsure if the sound had been for their guar or meant for Noor and him. Any case, they followed.

Slinging one leg over the guar’s big sad-smiling face, over the horn of their saddle, Tammunei slipped down onto the plain. Nothing to see. Only the grasses, almost an ordinary green here and hushing high against Tammunei’s shoulders.

Noor curled her legs under her, coming to sit her saddle cross-legged. Frustrating ease, unlimited patience.

Simra kissed his teeth and followed Tammunei. A clumsy mimic of how they’d dismounted, and Simra’s boots hit the ground. Landing, falling, at least, he could do. “Stay,” he told his horse, turning his head back to fix it with a stern frown. “Stay.” Again, sterner, in the closest thing his tongue would come to Deshaan Velothis.

There was no comprehension in the way it stared back. A single sidelong preybeast’s eye. Eerie how it put him in mind of talking to Tammunei sometimes. Same opaque angled look. Same hard time telling if they’d really understood.

The horse stayed, but more from its own will than Simra’s command, he reckoned. It dropped its head to champ at something on the ground, disappearing into the grass save the peak of its saddle and height of its withers.

Simra kissed his teeth again, planted his spear in the dirt with its blunt iron buttspike, and followed Tammunei a short ways into the overgrowth.

With a careful hand, Tammunei parted a wall of grass. Beyond it, the growth was shorter. Between the blades, a ragged circle of fungus grew, in yellow-white and spotted scab-red and the occasional tall spire of blue. Like soapbubbles, heaping over each other. Like a Telvanni town, sprawled in miniature.

“How many of those are any good to eat?” Simra peered through the parted curtain of grass, hesitant to step inside. He’d read stories about forest spirits, marking their sanctums with spirals or circles of small smooth stones, or else with rings of toadstools. Cradletales, but they still put an apprehension in him.

“The white parasols,” Tammunei said.

“The pale frilly ones? Good. That’s most of them!”

“The red spotted ones too. Only the stems though, and only if you plan to sleep soon.” Tammunei crouched, brought out a small sicklebladed knife, and set to harvesting the white mushrooms from off their stubby jaundiced stalks.

From behind them, Simra heard Noor begin to sing. A low quiet drone of noise, familiar by now as the moaning wind or whispering grass.

“What about the blue ones?” Simra asked.

“Bad to eat. Slack muscles, swollen ankles and wrists. A stronger extract locks the joints if you mix it with hackle-lo tea, boil it down…”

“And the reds if you eat the caps?”

“Bleeding gums. Bad dreams. There’s no virtue in them.”

“Less you’re cooking for someone you don’t like, or you need to play ill…”

“The second — why would you..?” Tammunei looked up, some small dismay on their face.

Simra shrugged. “Don’t know. Never know what you’ll need to do. Not til it’ll help to do it.”

Tammunei didn’t respond, but must have understood. Red spots and blue spires, they picked a little of both.

Simra brought out his notebook. Purple, clothbound, pretty, seldom used except to cram full of sidelined thoughts and things to remember. Not since he’d bought the parchment and started thinking bigger. He took out a twisted charcoal pencil and started to scribble down what Tammunei had told him.

“What are you writing?”

“Notes. What you’ve just said, mostly. About them.” Simra pointed with his pencil down at the mushrooms.

“Why?”

“So I don’t forget. So next time I’m hungry and have my choice of mushrooms, I’ll know which way to choose.”

“But why write? Might you forget if you do? Your mind won’t have as much need to remember.”

“Might do. Then I’ll have my notes to look back at, right?” Might do, Simra thought again to himself. Might do, but probably not. For one thing, the notes let him pretend it was otherwise. “Best to have them. Just in case.”

“What about the other writing?”

“What?”

“On the other paper, with the pen. That’s different? Different tools for different tasks.”

“That’s different.” Simra nodded though his gut sank, like being a child again, caught out in some secret mischief. “Kind of. That’s for remembering too, but for other people. Just in case.”

“Other people? To help others remember what?”

“Me, I reckon… Y’know, for if they need to.”

“Oh.” A sad thoughtful pause. “Can I read it?”

Simra had known that was coming. It brought a further sinking with it. Colour burnt up hot across his cheekbones. “Maybe.” He forced calm into his voice. Attempted an easy smile. “Maybe when it’s done. Or if I don’t finish it. Maybe then.” The smile faltered. “Didn’t know you could read. Just assumed… After what Noor said…”

“Only slowly. Loudly. If I try to read your secret just-in-case memory-papers, you’ll hear of it.”

Simra’s lips parted. His throat choked up a laugh, catching the fact that Tammunei had made a joke a moment before his mind. Laughter was good. It hid the fear he felt for what he’d already written. How it was for everyone and no-one at all; strangers but perhaps never friends; for Tammunei, yes, but not for them to read themself. It was a book braver than he was. In that moment, braver than he felt by far, and off to the point of foolishness.

A thought came. He could burn it, every page, leave no trace. No thought had ever been so tempting or so unbearable both at once. He couldn’t.

When they sat later at their cookfire, cloaked to the night by magic and eating a fry of soft tart-tasting white mushrooms, Simra didn’t. Though the thought came back and the fire beckoned all the same.


	17. Chapter 17

“You’re not going in?” Flat-voiced, but Simra’s face was so incredulous it bordered onto pity. Brows both knit and raised at once. A pursed mouth, derisive at the corner his scars would still let curl.

“I see no need,” said Noor.

“Yeah. Right. If you don’t count ‘getting clean’ and ‘not freezing your toes off when you get the fucking chance’ as decent reasons…”

“We cross the Desh come morning. That’s all we need from Oudabridge. All I need.” Noor’s voice turned goading. “The rest is baelathri nonsense. Excess.”

“Baelathri,” Simra echoed the word with the shadow of a sneer. It was one he’d seldom heard but knew all the same. “Tomb-dwellers. Tsscht. Dunno how convincing that whole act is, coming from you. All that ‘lest the decadent works of settled folk sully me; like corpses they roof themselves in stone and trap themselves in living death’ crowshit. Not when it’s coming from a woman who lived in a fucking bonestrewn cave under a fucking settled folk city for however-fucking-long.” Simra’s laugh was a mean and meagre thing. One cold and barking note.

Noor charged to fill the silence that came after. “That’s different—!”

“Nchow! Be different, then! You need me, I’ll be over there, being warm and clean and exactly as drunk as I blighted well want to be, in a bed that doesn’t make my back feel like it wants me dead. Ghosts and fucking bones…”

Simra rolled his eyes. Kicked at the hard-packed dirt that made up the skirts of Ouadabridge’s west bank. A herding ground, he reckoned by the short turf and rings of pale starved grass he’d seen as they rode in. Pitching grounds for Velothi more likely to trade than raid. Noor would fit right in between the piles of dried dung and the cold-moaning wind.

He turned to Tammunei. “You coming?”

“The yurt. The guar and horse…” Tammunei said, slow. “Someone else should stay.”

Simra nodded. Tried not to show the warm relief that flooded his chest. He’d be alone, at least for a night. Alone somewhere coin could be spent, food and drink got by asking.

“Right, well… Take care of them then,” he said. “The fucking pony can go to the knackers and butchers for all I care, ‘cept that then I’d have to walk. So yeah. Take care.” The last two words were softer than he’d meant them to be. He hurried to bury them. “Meet you at the second bridge come morning?”

“Dawn?” said Noor.

“Later’s best. I’m paying for a bed, fucked if I’m not making the most of it.”

A scowl deepened the lines and shadows that crossed Noor’s face.

“Tsscht. We’ve got a whole other half of the fucking plains to cross. You can make a proper Velothi of me then. For now, you wanna begrudge me all the decadence and ills of the baelathri, please be fucking quiet about it.”

“Did I say anything?”

“Tsscht…”

Simra turned away, colour and curses and muttering tongue all held behind his teeth. He unshouldered his spear and planted its spike, working it a moment til it had broken the dirt enough to stand.

“Keep that too. Don’t wanna have any accidents with any fucking doorways.”

Crouching, he looped an arm through the strap of his gathersack and lifted it over his right shoulder, up from where it had slouched on the ground. The pot-belly of his kettle dug through the sackcloth. A grimace.

“Before noon then?” he asked.

“Before noon,” said Tammunei.

Simra’s mood raced ahead of him across the plain, happy maybe, or perhaps just fast. Coarse-cropped grass; sky turning pink with the early fall of evening. The wind was restless, antic, now at his back and rushing him on, now in his face and scourging his cheeks, numbing his mouth til it felt lipless.

Walking the last distance to Ouadabridge, Simra reached down and hitched the netch-leather tails of his leggings around his hips, tying them in front. They made a kind of lopsided kilt there – an extra layer of almost-armour – but for now it was enough that it stopped their blighted flapping.

“Dramatic, yeah, but a fucking bother into the bargain…”

He couldn’t say the same of his mantle. Every step he took and every change in the wind, the breeze grew hooks and tried to fish the old goatskin cape off his shoulders. Simra’s right hand clutched at the pin-and-ring brooch that held it round his neck, knuckles white with gripping and fingers pale with cold.

His left was at rest on the hilt of his sword: the raider’s sabre with its heavy curved blade and smooth wood grip, ridged to fit another mer’s fingers. Another new sword, taken from someone for whom he reckoned it had been an old one. How many had come through his hands down the years, like this one, and the one before? He’d remember each one if he tried maybe, but the order had turned to a blur. The first few had each been as precious as the last. When had that stopped?

“You stopped being a stripling, happy just to have something steel in your hands,” he told himself, muttering under his breath. “That’s all. You learnt what suits you.”

This one sure as sunrise didn’t. Not so much as a disk or bar to get in the way between blade and handle. Nothing to protect the fingers. His grip shifted uneasy on the wood of it. Perhaps his right hand stiffened.

“Learnt what suits you,” he repeated. “Little later though, you learnt that nothing suits a swordsman’s hand worse than nothing at all. Shitty skinflint fucking sword or empty fucking air, I’ll take the sword any day.”

Most of the words he spoke were patois, dragged with him from the Grey Quarter, but fewer than they once had been. He carried them with him but, more and more, new words fit under his tongue and found voice when he set it moving. Bits borrowed and sucked up and stolen from all the languages that had crammed into the gorge where he was born — tongues that had knit and bred together til they birthed out a language of their own. Nordic cadence, curses and oaths, and words to talk of weapons. Trade-words and scriv-words, scholar’s words, lifted haphazard from Imperial Tamrielic, Hlaalu Dunmeris. And Velothis now, creeping in at the corners, last of all where by rights it ought to’ve been first. The mothertongue his mother had hoarded and hogged from him…

Nowadays his mind spoke a dialect of its own almost, and it came out loud in private. Talking to himself, he sowed it on the air as he walked, leaving parts of where he came from and parts of where he’d been. Like Noor sang who she was and who her ancestors were, all across the plain. Like perfume lingered in a room long after the one that wore it.

Simra stopped that thought where it started. Cut it out like rot before it could spread.

Ouadabridge drew up from the evening ahead. Shapes first – the blocks and planes of Hlaalu adobes – then a slow lighting of lamps and brighting of windows. Slits and squares and spheres alike, in brass and green and blue, began to break the beginnings of shadows, and stem the gathering gloom.

The glow of a lantern-staff showed the start of a bridge. A long cane of bound and bundled rattans; a teardrop of plain-glass hung from a link at its tip, wicks and oil inside shedding light. A watchman slouched against its shaft. She wore a loose fold-breasted coat of yellow-brown cloth armour, sleeves lending down into mittens at the hands. Another shaft of bundled rattan rested against the start of the stone bridge behind her, this one tipped with an iron billhook.

“Your business?” Her voice and stance and resting weapon were all eloquent about her boredom. A pair of eyes checked Simra, loose from under her wide-brimmed conical hat. More farmer than soldier, he reckoned.

“Bed for the night. Hot meal.”

The guard gave a grunt in her throat. “And your business?”

“Money spent and gone by morning?” He smiled.

“‘Traveller’ then. Sorry friend but there’s a tithe for that.”

“Little place like this?” Simra was taken aback by his lack of surprise. “Shut up…”

She shuffled. Raised a mittened hand to worry at one round pock-marked cheek. “People round here,” she began, defensive, in a dialect not-quite-Hlaalu. “They pay into the pot, see? Yearly. Or they do their turns on watch. But those as are passing through, see, they still get guarded. Come under protection of the town-law, don’t they? Sorry, friend, but someone’s got to pay for that, seeing as they don’t pay no taxes…”

“Thought this one through, haven’t you?” Simra’s hand went from the hilt of his sword to search into his satchel. “Now, I dunno if you’re stupid and honest, or a little bit clever and trying to pull one. If I’m honest, I don’t care. Thing is though, don’t think you care much either. Right?” He brought out a purse, chiming blunt with coin. “What’s the tithe, friend?”

“Call it three.”

“Shils? Call it five. That’s a dram of decent sujamma for you, or as much absolute swill as you’d ever wanna drink in one night.”

“What you want for it?”

“Know some things.” Simra shrugged. “Whatever you know. What’s the news between here and Senie. Davon’s watch if you wanna go one better, but Senie’d be a start.”

“Senie? Pshaw… Think I know what happens far as Senie?”

“Guarding the one open bridge on the Desh in close to a hundred leagues? And with road from here to there, if I’m not wrong? Reckon you do. Reckon you get plenty of fascinating types through here, coming both ways…”

“Six.”

Simra gave a calculated sigh. “Alright, alright. There’s six in it for you. If, that is, I like the sound of what you tell me.”

“You’re talking swordwork, aren’t you?”

“Swordwork, scalpwork, whatever… What’s the word along the road?”

The answers came. Simra listened. Later, alone in a cornerclub called the Journey’s Pause, over mazte, balls of rice and dried shrimp and reed-greens, and a yolk-gold bird’s egg soup, Simra took notes.


	18. Chapter 18

_Strange. I don’t think there was one mer among us not scared half to death and nerves shot to shaking by what we faced at the gatehouse. Neither those on the walls and able to fight, nor those yet to climb them, helpless outside._

_The Morrowind natives among us in particular faced something awful. These corpsewalkers had no necromancy behind them. Nothing to hate except that they made us fear them. Only something gone wrong in the nature of things. The souls of those who ought to’ve been ancestors to someone, caught instead in their bodies, with parch and rot both fighting to claim them. Patrolling their old watches, mindless. Lying dormant til something came near — life to envy, interruptions to rage at, who can say?_

_As individuals we each had the salt shocked out of us. But as a group our survival emboldened us. A sigh of relief through us all, soundless but sole in its meaning: still alive, still alive. Tammunei did that. As they did back in Bodram, so they’d done now._

_The air reeked of burning. Cloth and hair and bone. Smoldering paper. Preserved by the souls inside them but otherwise gone to husks, the flesh of these things had ceased to be flesh. A small mercy. None of the usual meat and fat stench as they burnt._

_Bones and weeds in the courtyard. Mushrooms trod under our feet as we regrouped._

_A second turret of bitter smoke poured up from the tower staircase I’d set ablaze. With shaking hands I searched my satchels and came out with a scrap of dried root. Pale pink guljana – manpaw, creeproot – to still the spent ache in my belly. I slipped it into my mouth and began to chew. First the tannic taste of overbrewed tea. Next would come a heaviness in my limbs, something between wading in water, or trying to run from a nightmare. But it would stem the sick hollow feeling of drawing on my body’s magicka deeper than I ought to have. I had no better recourse._

_I was bruised and battered. Something had scratched me close to my temple. A line of blood had gone to crust, drying down the side of my face. The first corpse I fought had got its claws into my side, tearing tattered a patch of my aketon, but sparing the shirts and skin beneath. And that was another larger mercy all its own. Any fleshwound got from those things’ teeth or claws would go sour, sure as anything._

_“Thank you…” I croaked, voice scorched and coming out black. “Thank you.” My feet began to pace._

_All around me a chaos of voices, murmuring. Who was hurt? Take this, here, take it, it’ll help. My brother, have you seen my brother, blue eyed, can’t miss him, have you seen—? Someone was crying. A high thin ceaseless sound like a baby’s wail in a full-grown throat, no regard for breath except when a new sob tried to start but pulled on empty lungs._

_No warriors, these, I reminded myself. It couldn’t be helped. And this had been both kinder and crueler than any skirmish against the living._

_Spent but restless, I paced. My eyes veered, fixed on one soot-stained grubby nerve-drawn face, then the next, and then the next. It might’ve looked like concern. Some might’ve expected that of me as Tammunei’s second. The one with a mind to keeping us fed, watered, safe. Whose thoughts were on every banal and needful thing that would keep the lot of us living. Tammunei’s mind was ever a day ahead of us, always in Vvardenfell, pressing on and onward. Live too much in the future, or dwell too much in the past, your thoughts cease to think, and turn instead to dreams._

_One face I saw had blue eyes. Strange in a Dunmer. That was a third mercy. Somehow it made things better._

_“Your brother!” I called out, raising my voice as best I could. “Here, your brother!”_

 

The bathwater was warm. Its surface shone in slicks and whorls and its steam rose nut-like sweet with apricot oil.

He’d seen the trees as the sun set last night. They were everywhere in Oudabridge, anywhere they could force roots into the dust. At least he’d assumed they were apricot trees. It was almost Winter and their limbs held no fruit. But the cornerclub itself had three such trees in its narrow walled grove of a garden. No fruit perhaps, but the oil from their kernels went in most everything they cooked. Why shouldn’t it be in their bathwater too?

Simra leaned backwards, sinking himself to the tip of his chin and curling his legs and back to fit the short oval tub. Scent and heat, the smooth and soothing slickness of the oil as it soaked into his skin. It had all been pleasant for the time it took to blink twice, but quick enough it had turned to guilt, and guilt turned all the rest with it. What was it the Nords said about bad apples and barrels? One tainted with rot will sour the whole lot.

His skin prickled now, thick and gelid, like his bones had gone soft while his muscles stayed tense. A glowering pain nestled at the front of his head, between and just above his brows. A hangover that felt like a third eye opening, just as in the old Sixth House stories. Simra grimaced, disappointed. He’d not been drunk, not by a long way. If he’d known he’d wake up feeling this way, he’d have gone the whole distance and earnt it.

“And how much more’d that cost you, hm?” His breath troubled the water’s surface as he muttered. “Four shils more? Five?” Simra kissed his teeth. “Done enough damage already. To yourself and your purse.”

He’d wanted comfort. A change from the plains, the yurt, the hard ground beneath its floorcloth and his bundled up mantle for a pillow. Not luxury, just a chance to stop feeling like an animal. It wasn’t excess. In the greater scheme of things it didn’t come close. But sixteen shils, a redware yera, a piece each of Imperial copper and silver, spent in a night and morning on nothing that would last — it felt like excess all the same.

“Feel better if you’d got something solid, would you? Real and needful and lasting? Fuck off.”

Sword, boots, a new bag or book, a coat for the cold — Simra knew it would make no difference if he’d spent the same on them. It would still set his upbringing a-clamour inside him. A sick and stomach-fallen feeling that had made his bed seem rough and hard, and this bath feel like being a piece of hardybread soaked to soften in broth.

The numbers moved and changed in his head, unwanted and unprompted. Coins flowing in and out of Imperial, never staying long, but always passing through. Three drakes to the shil and seven drakes on the penny. Two shils on the penny with some sliver of loss meant twenty-four to the shilling, but not if you counted those slivers, like you always ought if you’re clever… Thirty-two shils, then, to a shilling, on a good day, in a fair exchange.

For two weeks a shilling could feed a family of four and leave scraps still for rainy days. All the more scraps for a family of three. That was his mother’s reckoning. The first part came of shrewdness and thrift, the second part from pain. If he had it figured right, he’d spent a third again more than that. Not luxury, he’d told himself, but now it came as a question. Not luxury? Back home it would be. Back home it was good food, meat, a ways towards rent for the month or stores for the Winter.

The sound he made was part sigh but the rest was a growl of disgust. Up from the water, Simra heaved himself dripping, both arms braced to the sides of the tub. He grimaced as his bruises complained. Newer knocks and pains. The old aches spoke up too, down his back and across his shoulders: a tightness that only came open by tearing. The scars at least were silent, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

Cold the stone floor under his feet, even through the rushes. He soaked them as he stepped from the bath. The lingering bitter-white scent of leech-lily soap. Together with the cornerclub’s apricot oil, the distant rainstorm smell of boiled riverwater, they filled the small room to its rough-plastered walls.

Steam fogged the tiny diamond of polished steel that Simra had set on the nightstand. Better that way for now, he reckoned, and pushed back the dripping white weight of his hair. Clothed to the collarbones – or in a mirror the size of his hand – he was marked enough already.

The deep scar through his lips, from nose to chin. The tear straight down through his right ear’s lobe, ragged and stupid. The shallow horizontal on the left side of his throat, too, if he wore no scarf. The twinned stars on either side of the muscle between neck and shoulder, one where the arrow went in and another where Kjeld had pushed it out.

But naked, bared down to bones and dove-grey skin, there was no escaping the rest. Arms and shoulders, forearms, ribs. One wide stripe on the side of his thigh, like the growth-marks on Gitur’s hips…

“Ghosts and bones,” Simra muttered, swearing as his body remembered back to Windhelm, the parlour under the Grey Quarter, the bedding-down musk of soft pelts. A testing flex of feeling, as mixed as every scar. But better he dwelt on that than the torn ear…

Simra dried himself with a sheet of kreshcloth, folded beside the tub. He mussed his hair from soaked to simple damp. Wrapped his loins and feet, then stepped and struggled into his leggings. Again his shoulders complained. No quiet tightness now, but a sharp insist of pain. Lips gone into a crooked snarl, teeth all grit together, Simra let go a hiss.

He sat down hard on the bed, hating that he had to. Old, he thought. That was how it felt. Old already. It hurt to reach out to the nightstand. Hurt worse to turn his head and see. He shuffled at the hips instead, to look and grope for his bandages.

Without them, bare, his right hand was a mess. He looked down, grim-curious, to watch as its fingers flexed. Index and thumb as normal, but the outer three were pale and bloodless, skin cured tight. Ropes of scar knotted round their knuckles, ugly back and ugly palm. The tendons stood out rigid in a squall of silver seams that spread like lightning along the heel of his hand and towards the wrist. A whole hand, true, but it didn’t feel his own. Something stolen instead — broken, then borrowed back.

Simra wrapped it, covered it, everything up to the second knuckles of his corpse-pale fingers and the nails on them that never grew. It was awkward, clumsy left handed, but he was well practiced by now. Well-used to that, as much as to the looks of confusion, the quick glance down, that came with the name he’d made for himself, then half-glad left behind.

“Seven-Fingers…” He snorted. Another thing he’d traded in, all part of the price he’d paid. Another reputation gone all but cold and a new one in need of making.

Shirts, jacket, bags. Simra finished dressing. With kohl-lined eyes and goatskin mantle tossed back over one shoulder like a dandy’s cape, he stepped into the cornerclub’s courtyard, sack on his back and satchel at his side.

A triangle of paving slabs surrounded another of dirt. Bare-armed apricot shrubs, and a spray-limbed pomegranate tree, limbs weighted and red with fruit against the drab white sky.


	19. Chapter 19

Simra broke his fast. A thick porridge of whole-hull rice, silky with starch but each grain still in need of chewing. Three drakes. Chunks of cured and fried guar-belly bacon in a paste of black pepper and black vinegar. Five more drakes. The cost hung over each mouthful, wringing the joy from it all. Paid for up front, with room, board, bathwater, but what change did that make to the mood of it? Far less than he’d hoped.

The commonroom at the Journey’s Pause cornerclub was a shallow half-moon, a spare second storey above its half-buried chambers and garden-courtyard. A curtain of clay and lacquer beads led into an unseen kitchen. Tables lined the outer wall, punched haphazard through with murky windows of smoke-grey glass that looked out onto the stables and street beyond.

Simra gnawed an end off a pink length of blanched sweetstem, chewed a moment, then crammed the rest sidelong into his mouth. Followed it with half a cup of black astringent tea. Two drakes, then a third maybe of a further three.

“You’ve got sugar, right? Molasses — any kind?” He caught the serving-boy’s eye, gesturing to his brown clay teapot. “I’d be grateful.”

A loose shil found its way from pocket to palm and Simra clicked it onto the tabletop. An ugly round of tarnished tin, studded with the sigils of some small-house he’d never heard of, with a square hole stamped through its middle. The black-haired serving boy hurried in, took the coin, and set down another clay pot this one half-empty with molasses black-red as a blood-clot.

“Pomegranate?”

The boy nodded. There were scars on his face; the beginnings of a Vereansu shape to his skull, hidden beneath his mop of charcoal hair. It seemed all sorts washed off the steppe and found itself staying at this riverfork town.

“Thank you.” Simra stirred a spoonful of molasses straight into the teapot, but saved his eyes for the boy, sincere as he could make them. Pays to be kind to whoever handles your food. In a band of sellswords, if you make one friend, make sure it’s the cook. In the halls of a lordling, be as good to the cupbearer as the kinlord himself.

Two Dunmer sat two empty tables away. Fingers red with oil, they shared a bowl of meat and fried snowpeas. Long coats on the backs of their chairs, stitched from patched leather and hardwearing cloth. They ate and shared a soft familiar silence. Lovers or family, Simra reckoned — by the look of them, brothers. The hair on one was lank and long. The other wore his pulled back behind his ears in thick oiled braids, but both were tressed the colour of old-tusk ivory, and with skin a dust-light grey.

Lank-hair sat half-facing Simra. He was watching, and none too shy of it either. Not quite staring, but looking a touch too often up over Oil-braid’s shoulder, shirted in cheap silk. Already he’d spared Simra more glances than he’d like.

Simra stared back, just long enough to remember Lank-hair’s face. Nose broken into a squashed grey persimmon, cheeks whiskered with pale stubble, he narrowed his eyes and smiled trouble across the commonroom, licking red from the fingers of one thick fist.

A quick upward nod of the chin, two raised eyebrows, then Simra went back to his bowl of porridge, his pot of tea. Hidden, his fingernails worried the tabletop, unseen behind his breakfast.

He forced himself to enjoy the food for all the coin he’d spent on it. Steadied his hands by smoothing a knife through the white flesh of a custard apple, paring away slices towards his mouth, casual as he could. Still the look he’d shared with the other Dunmer had tripped his heartbeat and put a sick and stomachless feeling below it.

Best to be careful when the time came to leave. Careful, he thought, but not so much as to run. They were dogs, men like this. Give them the slightest scent of a chase, they’d turn anything into a hunt. By the look in Lank-hair’s eyes they already meant to. And that was enough to fill him with it: the shrill beast-basic urge to bolt, where stillness felt like burning.

Simra’s mouth had turned to a hard thin line as he cloth-wiped clean his knife-blade. He slipped it into the sheathe that hung from the left of his swordbelt: a narrow pannier of leather below the baldric that carried his sword in its scabbard, stitched with two twinned sheathes. There the heavy incurved blade sat beside the longer filleting knife.

When Simra rose from the table – bowls scoured empty, piled up together for the serving boy and gone over almost clean – both knives showed visible, broad and blatant beneath his sword. So too the leaf-bladed once-spearhead, sheathed in lacquered pretty plumwood on his right hip.

That was good, Simra told himself. The better to stop folk suspecting the razor in his jacket or the wand in his boot. Hard to say now how much charge it would have recouped since the raiders out on the plains. Impossible to say until he started spending it. Two perhaps. Best not to gamble on three — he didn’t feel that lucky.

From the corner of his eye Simra saw Oil-braid drum his fingernails on the tabletop. A signal, twinned to a quick sideways jerk of his head.

Simra nodded his thanks at the serving boy. Core tight and coiling, and with legs of a sudden gone stiff, Simra made for the door and the stairs leading out from the Journey’s Pause. Bluffing with face and body, he tried for indifference, an air of nothing.

They had no need to pretend, he reckoned. The shunt of their chairs on the floor; their footsteps across the room. Simra pushed through the door and descended the stairs. Behind, he heard them follow.

The day was drab. A fine mist of rain began to fall, and already the steps were slick down the side of the cornerclub building, slowing Simra as he went.

Ouadabridge nestled in the crutch of two rivers. Bridges reached to east and west, granting passage to or from either side of the plains. The town itself spanned a long street between them, lined with square-built shops, houses, and clubs, in greyish plastered brick. The storeys grew shorter out from the street. Narrow alleys and roads ran off towards the waterfronts, or south through thickets of basketlike woven reed and daub hovels, towards the rice fields planted out in the river-mud.

He could lose himself in that, Simra reckoned. Lose these followers out of the bargain. But not without letting them see he was fleeing; perhaps not without hitting a run. A traveller would have no business off the main street. And Simra still had business in town.

He went east down the street, walking quick as any city-raised child would through crowds and carts and foot-traffic.

An old womer roasted apricot stones by the roadside, over a brazier that hissed in the rain, cracking the blistered black hulls with her blistered black hands to sell the cooked kernels inside. Two farmers in wide reed hats and raincapes, and a trader – a stockpiler maybe, in robes of red cloth and buffed leather – squabbled in thick dialect over a covered cart, rut-stranded in the muddy street. Hitched to the cart, a draught-guar watched them sidelong, with one embarrassed eye. The current of townsfolk and travellers surged past them, Simra pushing with them.

Simra could lose them in this too, if only he bolted. But he felt their eyes on his back all the while. Too calm and unwary of his weapons to be simple street-toughs looking for an alley to jump him. None of that slavering hunger; no glimpse of desperation. Besides, they were mer grown, not youths with few skills and fewer still to lose. More likely they were like him – knew their business and wanted to know his – and that was worse by far.

“Fuck…” Simra muttered under his breath, shouldering past a mer in tinker’s packs, weighed down with hides for sale.

He imagined it, back in the commonroom: what he might have done. Rise and they’d rise too. Feint for the door but grab for the teapot. Throw it, lump of bronze and splash of scalding tea and all. Buy that moment; sell it for better. Kick a table into the closest one. Back off from the other as he came on. Grab the wrist that threw the first punch he could catch. Twist—…

But that path was paved with damages paid to cornerclubs. That way demanded that he strike first, with feet and fists and elbows, and he’d never been much for them, compared with those that were. And more, it put the law on their side as well as numbers.

For now that law would cut both ways. They knew it. They’d watch him, follow, and wait til clear of town where the odds would change. One afoot would turn to three with mounts ready, and they would still be two. Simra only needed to get to the eastern bridge. His change of odds would be waiting there, and as yet they didn’t know it.

Til then it was all manoeuvres. On the battlefield, or else the campaign map, Simra knew little enough about those. He’d read Arctus, Nicona, but drawn out near nothing of use — nothing except maybe a handful of references with which to entertain other bores that had read Arctus and Nicona. The one war he’d fought in had kept him too far from either front or rear to see much of strategy at work. Instead he’d been ever at the edges. But fighters circling, each teasing out a sense of the other’s measure — he knew how that played out. Delay and foray; angle, reangle, review the reaction; what opens, what closes, and when. Watching.

Simra slipped under the sign of a general tradehouse and through its door. Inside, the scent of dust and dry goods. Shade, shelves, hanging skeins of wholecloth, stacks of barrels. Simra had the storekeep scale him out two pounds of whole rice and name a rate. He offered to buy the three pounds he’d first intended, but under a better price for greater bulk, making it seem like a favour. One yera for that, six shils more for a scant pound of dried plums and apricots, wrapped up in rough paper.

“Anything more, ser?”

Simra glanced towards the slatted door, striped with daylight, then sharp over the counter. “Those cakes of tea,” he said, pointing at the stacked bricks on the countertop. “Half-pounds?”

The storekeep nodded. “Or thereabouts. A roasted dark-green, last year’s. The stamp is…well, it’s from near Narsis. Near enough.”

“Near enough?” Simra twitched an eyebrow. “Thereabouts?” A studied look of boredom came over his face. “I’ll give you another yera, but for that I want tea, and enough sujamma to fill this.” He untied the cloth ring that hooked a flat clay flask to his satchel-strap. Held the flask out.

“Ouadabridge isn’t some backwater, ser!” He feigned offence, knowing full well that both claims were half-truths at best. “These are fine products!”

“Fine enough, I’m sure. A yera and two.”

The storekeep hummed behind his tight-set lips, thinking it over. “A yera and two.”

A decent price to have worked out but Simra held back a wince. The storekeep took his flask, his coin. Even with the world waiting outside, and the linger of a headache open in his skull, some part of Simra’s mouth grew wet at the gulp of his flask as it took the sujamma.

“Blessings,” he murmured, turning to leave.

“And on you, ser.”

The din of the street once more. The scent of rain and mud; the clammy chill of it on Simra’s face and settling into his hair. His shoulders stiffened and his knees locked before he quite knew why.

“I’ll say, it’s a keen interest you’re taking in local colour, for an outlander.”

A fleshy voice, low but soft, speaking in Dunmeris. No hint of the nearby dialect to say its owner was any less an outlander than Simra. He forced his head to turn slow, betting he knew which it was, even before he saw the squashed and broken nose he’d heard in the voice’s vowels. Greasy rat-tail hair and careless-whiskered cheeks. Lank-hair leaned at the doorway’s side, a head taller than Simra, thumbs hooked into a broad striped sash.

“Colour?” Simra fought the panicked beat of his heart and made his voice come smile-sounding, biting forwards, not cowering back. “Friend, if you knew the fucking premium I paid in there to buy anything wasn’t grey, you’d take that back.”

“News, idiot. I’m talking about news. Been paying for that too, haven’t you?”

That set something in Simra to bristling. They were trying to goad him; get him trapped into action. He looked away a moment, to the doorway’s other side. Oil-braid stood, leaning with both hands on the upright shaft of a polearm, its blade at least wrapped in oilcloth.

“Pays to know what’s on the road ahead.” Simra gave a theatrical shrug. “Poor little outlander like me…” All in Dunmeris at least as perfect as theirs. Some idle reckless detachment of him wondered if the irony would be lost on them.

“Travellers don’t pay out like that. Ask questions, fine, but you gave out like a man protecting an investment. Or making one.” Lank-hair carried on, his angle all too familiar to Simra. “So you’re a merchant then, or a mercenary.”

“And you’re a fetcher with two eyes in your skull,” Simra said. “Fuck d’you want? My sincere commendations on your powers of fucking perception?”

“I want to know which,” said Lank-hair. “Weapons on you, way you talk… I’ll say, the smart money’s on merc, isn’t it?”

In truth they were starting to shake him. Not with what they knew but the interest they were taking. These two, one ugly and overfond of the sound of his voice, the other prettier and silent as grim death. It amazed Simra when his voice didn’t crack:

“For a mer with all the answers, you ask a lot of questions. Lot of talk in you. Got your brother’s tongue stuck in your mouth too, have you? That’d explain why he’s so quiet.” Simra jerked his head to indicate Oil-braid, still standing on his right. He carried on before they could pick it up as the goad he’d half-meant it to be. “My turn though, that’s fair. You know what I am ‘cos like knows like. So runs my reckoning. Am I wrong?”

Their silence said he wasn’t.

“If you were planning to rob me you’re a funny mix of premature and polite about it. So what’s your business getting your fingers sticky in mine, hm? One of two things I reckon, so which is it — you taking work, or giving it?”

Oil-braid pursed his pink lips and spoke in a voice near dry as Noor’s. “Sharing,” he said.

“What my brother means,” said Lank-hair, “is that we’d like you to share. Walk with us. Work with us.”

Simra frowned, shook his head. A different kind of robbery then, and a threat still attached to refusal. But if he took another approach… “You’ve got things twisted. You want my leads, you _follow_ my lead, right? You walk with me. You work for me.”

“Not sure you understand the game we’re playing here, outlander…”

“I understand fine.” Simra kissed his teeth. Time for the carrot and the stick. “Thing is, you don’t put enough fear up me to make me care,” he lied. “You don’t know my hand. You don’t know I’ve already got partners waiting outside town. Only reason I’d want you, ‘stead of just walking off where you can’t follow, is that you two open a door I’d otherwise reckoned closed to me.”

“What door?” Oil-braid husked.

“A job,” said Simra. “Long odds.”

“How long?” said Lank-hair.

“Dozen bounties at the least.” Simra let a touch of real excitement creep into his voice. The sound of his aching purses, and the coin he stood to gain. “A dozen in one job, and not so far from here.”

“A dozen…” said Lank-hair. “How many partners have you got, exactly?”

“Enough that they’re still long odds.” Best not to be exact. “Longer than I’d like on the ordinary. But the best gambler I ever knew always told me: long odds make for plush profits; you can never blame a man for chasing them, or stacking the deck when he does. What d’you say you help me stack my deck a little?”

“Full shares?” grunted Oil-braid.

“Full shares,” Simra smiled, crooked.

“We’re listening,” said Lank-hair.

“Then walk with me.”

Much as fate had tried its best to slam a door in his face, here at least he could force open a window. It always paid to have options.


	20. Chapter 20

“You speak any kind of Velothis?”

Lank-hair stuck Simra with a short fool-calling look. “Ashlander?” he said. His brother shared the look, mouth closed, but looking like he wanted to spit. “Do we look like we speak any ashlander?”

Simra shrugged. “Not so that I’d ask. Not on the ordinary, anycase. Thing is, my partners, they only speak Velothis. Well, not just Velothis. They’ve got enough of the Houses’ tongues in their heads to say please and thank you and hello. Not that you’d know it sometimes, to talk to them, but…”

He tailed off. They were nearing the edge of town. An open gutter crossed the dust trail that had skirted the western riverbank, and fringed the east side now. The rain fell on, turning the dust through dirt and into mud. Simra breathed shallow through his mouth to take out the worst of the stench and hopped across the two stride gap. Landing jolted him, up through his spine and into his skull, and set his brains to aching again.

“That a problem?” He looked back across the gap at Lank-hair and Oil-braid, asking into their silence.

Oil-braid grimaced, chucked his polearm over to clatter onto the far side. He followed, skipping easy over a moment later. “What kind?” he said.

Simra measured a response. Ashlanders walked a fine-teetering line these days, in the eyes of most Dunmer. The settled folk might grant them some token share of reverence – saviours of the old ways, keepers of sacred tradition, like the Temple said – but that was as a people. Theoretical.

“The holy kind,” Simra answered. “Good strong magic, I know that. Curses broken, ghosts sent to sleep. You’ve got to be green as Glass not to know that’s invaluable, line of work we’re in. So…is that a problem?”

“Not so that I’d make a problem of it, I’ll say.” Lank-Hair looked over the gutter, then stumbled across, ungainly. He slipped, caught his knee on the gutter’s edge and came up swearing. “Fuck! Fuck you with your forebears’ bones and all..!”

By his heavy build and huge hands, Simra had him marked at first for a brawler, a wrestler, a close-in hard-hitting scrapper of some sort. Hard now to say just what Lank-hair might be, but if he was any kind of fighter, he was a clumsy one — hadn’t taken long to reckon as much. Simra was still yet to see a weapon on him, whereas Oil-braid had his polearm, a long knuckle-bowed dagger, and a hammer-backed hatchet through his belt.

Lank-hair clapped dust from his shoulders and pawed at the smear of mud left on the knee of his plenty-pocketed trousers. “Fuck…”

“Ashlanders,” Simra prompted, raising an eyebrow.

“Right.” Lank-hair grunted, cleared his throat dryly, taking back what composure he could. “Wouldn’t want my sister to marry one, but I’ll say, I’ve no problem with those as have no problem with me.”

“Admirable,” Simra said, mocking. He’d expected as much. Eras of prejudice don’t starve out in a century or so; not when there’s those still so well accustomed to feeding them, whether they know it or not. “Not far now.” Simra turned, on toward the riverbank, and the black stone span of the bridge a ways along it.

“And you?” It was Oil-Braid’s voice. “Halfbreed or something, are you?”

Fuck yourself, Simra wanted to say. His back was turned on them, hiding the snarl that pulled across his face. It turned to a grimace as his brains gave another aching throb. “Something like that,” he grunted. “Enough that I speak their tongue fine.”

Better still that they didn’t, he thought. He and Noor and Tammunei would still have a way to talk without their new travelling companions listening in. And with travelling companions he trusted scarce at all, that was as big a blessing as he could ask for.

“Come on,” Simra said. “You’ve made me late.”

The rub and rattle of belts and sheathed steel. The muddy tramp of boots. Simra walked, and as they had all morning, Lank-hair and Oil-braid followed after. The stump-stump of Oil-braid’s polearm punched out an off-beat to the rhythm of their gait, staccato against the dirt after every other footfall.

They’d told Simra their names. Lank-hair was Bandrys and Oil-braid went by Galgas. Hard to make them stick, though, when he had perfectly good epithets already smeared onto each of them. And perhaps that was better, all told. Good not to get too close.

The bridge rose up on their left. A humpbacked shelf of smoothed black stone, great blocks for its two thick-piled supports, and a smaller mortaring of neat-cut rock for the span itself. It was narrow, the better to defend, and off abroad the plains and into the easting distance a mud and stone road ran out.

Two figures were squat by the roadside. Brown and salt-grey hair for one, and the other a glaring red. Nearby the level shape of Simra’s pony stood, mouthing at the short grass. Tammunei’s head twitched round, cat-wide face and small sharp chin, staring as Simra and the brothers crossed the bridge.

“Blessings!” he called in Velothis. All sunny tone and smiling, he raised a bandaged hand to greet them. “These shit-soles don’t speak any Velothis, and I told them you don’t speak baelathri! Please fucking play along!”

Tammunei seemed to shrink further into their crouch. If the grass here were longer, they might have disappeared. Strangers – settled folk – and he’d brought them here. An itching finger of guilt poked round in Simra’s chest.

But Noor rose, gathering all her height. Wind working at her long hair, she looked every bit the ashlander witch Simra needed her to be. “Blessings.” Her voice was stiff but that could just as soon be ritual as surprise, dismay, restrained disgust. “Who are they, Simra?”

Blame, he realised. That was the rigid note in her voice. Easy as falling, Simra’s guilt twisted defensive and changed. A glittering splinter of anger. He kept it from his voice. “Shit-soles, like I said.” Reusing words – giving the brothers sounds to recognise – would make the exchange seem more what he’d say it was. “Followed me. Tried to rob me. I talked them round for now, but don’t trust either one any farther than I can spit.”

“And so you bring your problem home, to Tammu and to me?” Noor muttered something, too quiet for Simra to hear even over their closing distance.

Simra strained to make his voice stay smiling. “You’ll have questions. Doubts. I know. But please for pity’s sakes, keep them in Velothis and keep them for fucking later!”

The bridge ended. Black stone turned to dark mud road, pitted sometimes with slabs of split rock. Noor stood with hands on hips, robe huddled round her small and shapeless shape, ragged at the edges. She was staring now while Tammunei couldn’t look. The two guar lay down beside her, sturdy legs folded under them and big heads stuck out straight. One peeled open a brown-gold eye to join Noor in staring questions at Simra.

“What was all that?” said Lank-hair.

“Greetings,” said Simra in Dunmeris. “Tradition.” He didn’t turn round. The rain itched at his scalp and his head ached beneath.

“Long,” Oil-braid observed.

“I’ll say.”

“Tradition, like I said. Ashlanders come back after a while in the world, they share news, swap stories. Like a ‘how are you?’ only sometimes the answers are interesting.”

“So what’d you tell them?” said Lank-hair.

“I told them it’s fucking raining. And that I found some help might make our money problems disappear.”

“Hm. She doesn’t look any too happy about it.”

“She’s not nearly so fond of money as me.” Simra halted, the brothers behind him. He stepped from one stone to the roadside, smart away from the worst of the mud. “Sers, Noor and Tammunei. Tammu, Noor, this is Bandrys and Galgas.”

“They don’t have mounts,” said Noor. “They’ll slow us.”

“As opposed to me bleeding in a gutter somewhere,” said Simra. “That’d really put the wind at our backs, hm?”

“What’s she say?”

“That we’ll have to go on foot for now.” Often best to weave a weft of truth through the warp of your lies, Simra reckoned. “I told her it’s worth it, all considered.” He turned to Noor, changing to Velothis, realising he liked lying to these strangers better than he liked speaking earnest with her. “We can lead the guar, the pony. They can take our packs. Save our backs a while at least.”

“For how long?” she said.

“Long as it takes to bring about an ideal fucking outcome.” A nervous tide rose up behind Simra’s words. “Far as I know, I’m the one in a hurry here. Few more days for you to sow your bones on the plains — what’s that to bite at you? Thought you’d be happy.”

“Happy? When like one stricken with a fever you go amongst the clan and spread what ails you?”

Tammunei stood without a word and began to saddle the guar, hitch them with baggage, busying themself.

“What’d you prefer I do?” Simra’s smile didn’t falter. Only the pressure behind his words rose, between these two conversations: like a fox called to frenzy when it scents blood. “Be so considerate as to get stabbed in an alley, lose our coin, and to come back and haunt you at the earliest point of mutual fucking convenience? Fuck off,” he said, flat and featureless as any other words might be.

“What’s she say?” asked Lank-hair, again.

“That you’d best be worth the hitch in our pace. She’s not convinced. You want in on this, reckon you’ve both got some insinuating to do.”

“Hghm.” Lank-hair grunted. Paused. “Doesn’t say much, your other one.”

He was looking at Tammunei, eyes on their back. Simra’s scalp prickled. His head ached. “Nor does yours.”

Simra’s calm felt harder to hold each moment that passed. What he said all but broke into a threat. A morning full of demands; twists of fate and changing plans. It ought to have been tiring, taxing on him by now, but instead there was a whirring nerve-heady joy to it, bigger than the press and throb of his hangover. Playing those who’d prey on him, with lies and lures to their worst selves. All it wore on was his peace, his quiet, and the test to his patience was as much a part of this glee as it was a kind of pain.

“Time we got on,” he said. “We’ve lost enough daylight as is.”

Bright eyed and heart pounding, Simra went to his horse. Happiness. It almost felt like happiness. Or at least a high that could pass for it. Down the years he’d learnt better than to question that when it came to call. Here it had found him waiting, watching, weighing his options and outcomes. Talking and knowing each word could tilt to victory or disaster. They walked on, and led their mounts besides.


	21. Chapter 21

At night they kept watches in pairs. Simra and Galgas, Noor and Bandrys. Never Tammunei, and never the brothers together — never one of the settled mer, awake without an ashlander to watch him as he watched them. No trust in all this, they’d agreed in silence. But wariness and mutual gain could walk hand in hand for a time.

Bandrys, louder of the brothers, tried to talk his watches through. Dazzling, the amount of nothing in the world he found to comment on. Hours after their evening meal he’d rub his belly through the blue and yellow stripes of his sash, thoughtful or pained, and narrate his digestion. Under a night sky filled with still pale stars, he’d look up, look over to Simra, look up again, and talk.

“I saw one moving once.”

“A comet?”

“A wandering star, I’ll say.”

“Suppose you wished on it, hm? Wished for wits. That’d explain a lot…”

In the dark, Simra heard his frown. “Wish on it? Hghm. Why’d I do a thing like that?”

“Hm. Must be a Western thing.”

“Outlander superstition, I’ll say. No, everyone knows you can tell a lot by the stars, don’t they? As it goes above, so it runs below.”

Simra thought back on the topics for talk that Bandrys had found in the past. Reckoned he could go his whole life happy without ever again hearing Bandrys talk about what was running below. The shifting of stars at least was better than the tides of his bowels. Simra listened, lending him at least one ear. A half-ear, lobe torn through.

“That’s what the deep-elves knew,” Bandrys continued. “Why they made their…”

“Orreries?”

“That’s right.”

“So you saw this wandering star one time. Right. Star-canny mer that clearly you are, what’d you reckon from it, in your wisdom?”

“Well, I’ll say, I don’t know about wisdom, but…” Bandrys feet shuffled against the ground, heels digging, shy. “This was when my brother and me had just started out. On our way coming north out of Temnar.”

“That where you’re from?”

“More where we ended up. Further south is where we were born, grown. Scaleskins got at our village though, and…I’ll say, maybe you know how that goes. Been at this work long? You must know… Ma got got in the fighting. Fever took da in Temnar, after. Galgas and me, I’ll say we upped roots. Tried to make the best of wandering. So when I saw that star I thought maybe it’s a sign. Maybe I’m doing something right…”

Simra regretted asking, near as soon as he’d asked. It was the kind of question that’d tell him nothing useful about the brothers. All it did was make them real, beyond how they could hinder him, or elsewise what they could offer. Best to stem that flow, before it got too strong.

“I knew an old stargazer once,” Simra said. “Clever old fetcher. Knew all sorts. Astrology, astronomy, and philosophy besides… Don’t reckon even he could fault you, thinking that. Hoping. That’s fair.”

“Fair..? Hghm. I’ll say, I don’t know about that. I don’t know that much is, in the end.” Bandrys’ stomach growled and gurgled, like the call of some animal way off in the night. “It’s all odds, like you said, and usually they’re against you. Best you can do is try slim down the difference.”

That sat better with Simra than any amount of starry symbolism, or trickle-down prophecy from out the night sky. There was enough in the world that hedged and hemmed in your fate already. The family you were born into; the place and the race of your birth. Worse than words would tell, then, to think that the time of your birth, and whatever accidents the stars had overhead from night to night could hedge and hem it all further. Things weren’t fair, but some choices would always be your own. It seemed fairer by far to think that, and put what faith in it you could.

Still, he’d have preferred silence. Alone on watch, cloaked up in Noor’s magic so the stars went out and the world closed off and no light they cast would show out on the plains, he could have written. Red glow tinting the parchment; black runes by magelight, cold as rubies.

The story was a mess by now. Try to make it fit itself – write like people write when they’re pretending they remember – he found he couldn’t write. It turned drab, false, filled with remove and conceit. Masked drama and mummery. But write like he remembered, and like he’d lived it then, five years before, three years, one year ago and counting, and it went all to pieces, and what was left was chaos. But so is life and the living of it. And maybe that was better. Or at least more honest.

 

_Old Ebonheart’s island district is mazed with roads that lead nowhere. Pits where the ground opened out and chasms down into darkness. Climbs and sheers of fallen wreckage, some hard to pass, others impassable. The citadel refuses us. I knew getting in would be hard; that getting through would not be easy. Now I wonder if getting out is even possible — whether it was ever a possibility._

_Ruin and hollow abandon. In the way things lie now, I can see it: a shadow of what passed over the city in the Red Year’s first red day._

_Towers toppled for aspiring too high. They crushed what lay in their shadow. Others stood strong, shored up by what could only be magic. The sea rose up in waves taller than any tower. Crystals of salt stain the walls, like high-tide marks on the Windhelm waterfront. We walk down streets that the sea coursed through, like rivers flowing inland, fatted on floodwater. The world turned upsidedown and has turned back slowly since._

_The ruins are half-reclaimed by growth. Green creepers throng the front of a temple. Impossible to tell if they’re trying to pull it down, or else they’re all that’s holding it up. Where the street yawned open and a hive-house fell inside, storey on storey, gone into the pit, fungi flourish in the wreckage. Green shoots grow between the flagstones we tread on. Something tells me to careful my steps. They’ve struggled up through all of this to sip what they can of the sun. So tread light, that something says. They deserve that much._

_We walk. We stop. Another dead end._

_The street’s two sides have collapsed together. The buildings lean, closer and narrower, yearning for each other, then finally they meet in wreckage. Splintered timbers halfway to rot; brickwork poured shattersome into brickwork. Like a roadfork but reversed; one path splitting into itself to become no path at all._

_Our procession collapses into itself too. A clot of names, faces, voices, and differing opinions. I know how this works now. The others will squabble then look to me as if I know any better. Or else they’ll look to Tammunei through me. Or else they used to, when Tammunei still needed a go-between._

_“Over? Listen, he wants to go over! Hah!”_

_“You saying I can’t climb it?”_

_“I’m saying we can’t all climb it is what I’m saying. We’re not all cursed with cat-claws and monkey-toes like you.”_

_“It’ll fall, more’s the point.”_

_“You so sure?”_

_“Look at it.”_

_“That’s your theory, is it? It’ll fall?”_

_“Look at it and tell me you’re still eager to test it.”_

_I feel the grimace on my face. Lost my patience with them days ago and it’s been lost ever since. Placing my boots careful over the flagstones, I move to a patch of cold sunlight. Let it soak into my skin. The ruins around us are overgrown. Cinders heap in doorways and hoard up in corners. A shrub clambers along the side of an apartment building, roots battling the plaster and brickwork with time for an ally._

_“Ashfall, d’you reckon?” I ask Tammunei, knowing they’ll be beside me._

_“What?” they ask, absent, standing on the edge of the shade I stepped out from._

_“Plants, mushrooms. Growing things. D’you think it’s ash that did it? Or just that no-one was here to stop it?”_

_“Ash, I think.” Tammunei’s voice is dry with disuse but elsewise full-returned. Even so, they use it seldom, and are short-spoken when they do._

_“That’s the way I’d heard it. A double-edged sword always hanging over Vvardenfell. Ready to smother the sun, suffocate crops, bury families in their houses. Choke the lungs and carry disease. But after it’s done, for all it takes from the present, it gives back to the future. Turns tough ground fertile. Alters things that’d struggle to grow til they’re forced to change and thrive…”_

_“Ash is fire. Not burning maybe. Not anymore. But still fire. Fire gone still.”_

_“And that means—?”_

_“Look!”_

_A shout goes up. It ripples through the squabble like the sudden shock of a hawk amongst a flock of sparrows. A great fumbling of questions. What? What is it? Where?_

_A hand points from the squabble’s center. I follow its fingers, up the heights of the ruins to our left. Past tiled half-roofs and tiered gutters, diamond windows, up the cracked face of an apartment building. The top is jagged where its final roof is missing._

_“There! Look!”_

_But the pointing hand points at nothing now._

_It was Balambal’s brother who shouted and pointed. Or else a mer he called brother, one of the last leftover from his kin-band. A younger Vereansu, with lynx eyes and a blotch of birthmark pink on his cheek and jaw. Scars are yet to mark his face but their lack marks him all the same: not yet Harrowed._

_Balambal is beside him already, bow uncovered and bent round one leg. Quick as instinct, he bends the last bend into it and puts a string to its nocks._

_“What was it?” I say. “What did he see?”_

_The younger mer is already babbling in Velothis, faster than I can follow. I turn to Balambal and ask again with my eyes._

_“A face. A ghost? A face.” He frowns. “It was on top of the house-cliff. Up where it’s topless. See?” He points now too, with a nocked arrow. Already he’s crammed a drawing-ring of bone onto his right thumb._

_“What? Another corpsewalker?” My left hand’s gone to the hilt of my sword, worrying an inch or so of blade loose from the scabbard. “Could there be more?”_

_“He says it moved like something living. Stood like someone watching.”_

_And I think to myself: I knew it. Through the fretting I’m almost smug._

 

Strange-filtered sunlight from a cloud mired sky. The clack and chunk of hooves, soft against the dirt-road, hard against the stones. The wider softer pad of guar; fewer feet and fewer steps, so they sounded almost like bootfalls and the walking of people.

The sound of travelling clothes shifting constant on skin. Silk had an airy voice, a breathy whisper. Then the creak and fold of leather in the silent strain of harness, saddle and saddlebag, swordbelts and boots.

And then there was the old stiff and softness of Simra’s jacket. All those sounds lived in it and more, so familiar they’d turned almost into a feeling. Silk lining and stitchwork of red and purple flowers; stiff short leather body; soft belled sleeves of softer leather.

He worried what the straps of his satchel were doing to wear at its left shoulder. Like he always worried over it, but couldn’t just stop wearing it. Nowhere to keep it if he saved it for best. And down the years, hadn’t he kept it safe? Not safer than if it had hung all this while, in a hole in the ground of the Grey Quarter. But still uncanny-safe, all considered.

A small rain had fallen again that morning. The road through the plains was half mud, and a quarter again was puddles. Each stand of water showed strange dark reflections as Simra and the rest trudged past. Colourless sky; flying things he’d failed to see when last he’d looked up, but saw plain as day when looking down. And then a corner of his sharp-lined face; a fall of ill-tempered hair or the slanted apricot-stone of an eye. His image, broken into pieces and scattered down the road.

 

_Dark gathers itself up over islandside Ebonheart. What was diffuse in the evening sky condenses into new solid blackness, pricked out with only the smallest holes of starlight. Like fisherfolk gathering in their nets at the end of the day, and the openness of the mesh closes up in a thick black heap._

_A cold sets in, deepening as the sky loses light after light after inch of pink-red light. Despite it, Tammunei and I lay side by side, and not together, tangled in each other, like we have before._

_Smock, tassel-fringed blanket, two coats that came as gifts from the others. All that lies layered on Tammunei as they lay on their back, hands clutched together at belly-height._

_I’m curled beside. I give scarce any warmth out to them and ask scarce any back. I curl like a cat, like a shell, like a secret turning to stone in the stomach of its keeper. Never could sleep except by being small. And I curl round a cold sullen fact._

_We are hungry again. Supplies have grown stark and spare again. Through my clothes I feel the warning of my ribs, the threat of my hipbones, worse than usual and soon to get worse. I know from Winters in Windhelm that the true warnings come when you stop feeling hungry. It’s by silence your body says: We are starving._

_So, tomorrow will take me away. Out with Shurfa, Balambal, Medis. To pick whatever meat we can from off the bones of this city. To crack whatever marrow we can, sucked from out its bones. And it’s needful, and it’s necessary, and I know that. The welling terror that’s welled up in me comes from how well I know that, and still am scared to go._

_Going would take me away again, and take them away from me. And I hate the fear that puts in me, with a hate so hot it’s shameful._

_“Knew it,” I say. “Life. The living. People living here. Making lives, I reckon. I said so, didn’t I? I knew it.” This is the kind of backwards tail-chasing thing I say when I’m too scared of silence to crave it._

_“I know,” Tammunei says. They make a difficult noise behind their lips, then carry on, reshaping what they said. “No, I knew.”_

_“Right. I mean — seemed inevitable, right? Knew it when I saw green things growing. It’s like that. Like crops and flowers come from ashfall, rainfall, whatever…”_

_“No,” they correct me. “It wasn’t a guess. I knew.”_

_I’ve learnt down the days and months that sometimes Tammunei will tell me more when given quiet to speak in. Works better at getting answers than prodding with outright questions ever does. So I’m quiet. I wait, guilty feeling from already having said too much._

_“I know because I can hear them. Loud. More, now that we’re close. There’s a lot now. Sea, city, the broken back of the sea, risen in breaking, up from the sea.” I hear them wince, troubling over their words. “And now them too. Loud before we came here, and now we’re here they’re louder. Hard to hear myself, sometimes. Most times. Sorry…”_

_I try to imagine it. Like trying to think in a crowded room maybe. Like trying to write in a place loud with words and speaking maybe. “I’m sorry,” I say, stupid._

_“No. That’s just it. It was easy at first, after Bodram. When I was gone for a while. Out of myself. I was hollow, so that meant I was a place to sound in?” The words come slow and thoughtful. Tammunei is explaining to themself as much as me. “Have you ever seen one: a jar full of singing? The settled-folk have them. Metal things, shaped so any sound that goes in will turn and come out as song. Clever. I was like that. I felt…cleverly made.”_

_I tried to imagine, but never imagined this. Alien to me, this desperate fondness; wanting so bad to be empty._

_“I wasn’t myself,” Tammunei says. “So it was easy to be full of other things. Like I’m meant to be.”_

_Full of hearing, I think. Filled with the song of others. Nothing to feel that feels like it’s your own. It puts a pale disgust at clench in my belly. Maybe it’s the thought of living like that – selfless in the core sense of the word – or maybe it’s something else I’m only now starting to think. An ingrown disgust that this is the person I’d come to want. Who I’d lain next to, held, helped, and got all so heated and heart-pulled over. Just a singing-jar, cleverly made so it would always show back whatever hopes you dropped into it. A thing that couldn’t say yes except by mirroring each yes you gave it._

_I think: If this has been a kind of love, I’ve let myself love passivity, and not a person at all. Tammunei doesn’t disgust me, except perhaps a little by this new strangeness. I disgust me. It’s hard to have room left for more, I disgust myself so sickly._

_“I didn’t know you were like that. Gone.” I say at last. “You make it sound peaceful…”_

_“It—… Yes.” Tammunei swallows. “It was peaceful. Appropriate…” Once again, that wistful note gets into their voice and bites me._

_My own voice is wooden now, as I talk so I don’t have to think: “If you hear the living, d’you know anything I should know?”_

_“For while you’re gone?”_

_“For when I’m gone.”_

_“Like what?”_

_“If they’re friends? What they want with us if they’re not?”_

_“It’s not like that. I don’t…it’s not that I hear the living. I can – sort of – sometimes. But I don’t think I ever did, here. Too much of everything else.”_

_“What then?”_

_“I think… What I think I hear…” Another wince. “What I think I hear of the living is how they disturb the dead.”_

_“They’re scavengers, then?”_

_“Grave-robbers. Urn-breakers.” Tammunei’s voice is edged with anger now. I can’t tell if it belongs to them or the dead themselves. I wonder if even Tammunei knows._

_A city of rags, I think to myself. Figures that it’d make for a city of ragpickers. Makes sense like nothing else has — not for a long time now._


	22. Chapter 22

The dark outside made the yurt an island. Inside, a lesser dark, a smaller dark, but starless. No difference whether Simra closed his eyes or kept them open. In that, it was more boundless than the night-dark that waited outside for the dawn. The problems it prompted were the same problem posed by the bleak new white of an empty page. Anything could find a home in it. Anything could take root.

Simra and Tammunei were off-watch. A namelessness of bodies, trying not to tangle, and in it Simra tried to sleep. But round and round and turning, thoughts circled like vultures in his mind.

Bodies. With only two of them sharing the yurt it was hard not to compare, backwards in his brain. Now as then, this was a place full of bodies and breathing; a warm darkness, covetous and keeping him.

It could have been Caselif all over again. Like the years between had never been and had all been only dreaming. Skinny body against skinny body, starving together through Winter, and struggling on to Spring, together and laughing. Going months and months never sleeping right because it was better to be sleepless but holding him than it was to sleep sound alone.

The dark made memory easy, heavy on Simra and hard to get out of, like clothes gone clingy-wet with rain. But the scent was different. Stoneflowers and spice wood; salt and scented oils. Something unwashed but more like damp clothes than the sour foulness of unwashed flesh — distraction, not neglect. That was Tammunei. A hazy scent, coloured like the vague blue between of a horizon.

Simra shifted onto his side. Hard to place himself in the small dark of the yurt. His surroundings were all told by touch. The meandering grain of goatfur on the inside of his mantle. The softer pile of the pelt that lined his bedroll. He ventured out a hand. There were his things, heaped up, and he knew that he’d left them near the doorway. Wooden scabbard, leather belt with lacquered panes, the bulk of his gathersack and all the oddments inside. Then, the yurt’s outer wall, sparred up its inside with struts of bone, like the ribs that cage a ribcage and give the skin its shape.

“Simra?” Tammunei asked after him, from the darkness. They’d heard him shift. In a stab of almost-guilt, Simra wondered if he’d woke them, or if they’d slept at all. “Sim?”

“Yeah.”

“How much longer til they’re gone?” Tammunei’s voice was colourless, tired.

“I don’t know,” Simra said.

“They wouldn’t go, would they? If we asked them?”

“No. They wouldn’t. They started out wanting something from me. Reckon they’re not gonna go til they’ve got something to show for it.”

“No. That’s not it.”

“No?”

“It’s you. You won’t let yourself let them go.”

Simra felt his jaw clench and waited for the flush to pass. “What did they do?”

“Do?”

“To you, to make you want them gone.”

“I didn’t say—…”

“Fuck off,” Simra snorted. “You good as said it, even if you didn’t.”

“They speak,” Tammunei murmured. “To me. They spoke to me.”

That set something bristling in Simra for reasons he couldn’t admit. “Which one?” he said, a promise, a threat.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Names. Faces.”

“Oh,” said Simra, sinking. A sadness for Tammunei; a guilt for pitying them. “Right.”

“They don’t stick. Don’t make sense. Masks and noise and nothing else, so I can’t tell the difference.” They paused. “Not always though. I recognise most people I recognise, most of the time. Just when I’m scared.”

Simra was silent for a time, not thinking. Just feeling the knot and unknotting uncertainty of it, not knowing how not to be wordless. Tammunei hadn’t always been this way. Travelling Blacklight to Bodram, they’d been more at ease in the crowds of the caravan; comfortable enough to talk with a stranger that they’d let themself talk to him. The years take their toll. Simra knew that well enough. Just what must they have taken from Tammunei that people were such a terror?

“I’m sorry they scared you,” said Simra at last.

“He asked me today – whichever one – what I’m for. Walked over, the one with the cold bare voice. Asked me what I’m good for in a fight. Made me tell myself things. That I’m nothing. Only weight. Skin and silence. But I didn’t tell anything to him. Just looked at him til he stopped looking back.”

“You’re not nothing.” But Simra was too tired to give the words the force they deserved. “Not in a fight or otherwise.”

“Then why do I need you?”

“Fuck. Same reason I need you. Because we’re stronger together than we are alone. What it’s worth, I’d rather have one of you than two more of him.” Simra hacked out a sigh. “But things being as they are, that’s why we need them too. For now. Not for much longer though, I promise. Just…I’ve been thinking. I need your help.”

Tammunei was a listening kind of silent.

“Need you to make something for me, and for you, and for Noor. Or just, I dunno, tell me, if you were gonna do something, how you’d do it.”

“This something — will it make them go away?”

Simra split a smile in the darkness. His lips were dry. Coming apart, they almost hurt. “Yes, and more besides.”

Vultures in his mind, turning circles still. Talk had killed the first and stopped its turning. Maybe Tammunei could solve the second: Simra’s thoughts of Galgas and Bandrys, the problem of them, and the possibilities too.

Three days they’d had to ingratiate themselves to him, and now three nights as well. Still Simra felt trapped between the company of both brothers, and comfortable with neither. They’d got off to a bad start, but there was no-one to blame for that except the brothers themselves. Just them and their greed in following him in Oudabridge to shake him down; their greed in settling for the promise of sweeter spoils down the way.

Galgas at least held a quiet far better than his brother. Held silent far better than most anyone Simra had known. Better than Simra himself, to the point where it turned eerie, awkward, anxious. Like hearing a noise in the night, waking and fearing, staring into the pitch-dark round you and daring something to exist within it while dreading that it might. That was Galgas’ silence. Not just gaps in conversation, but whole chasms of quiet.

In the end it was no more endearing than Bandrys, talking of his gut like a pampered pet and cooing over its every move. And so far as Simra could tell, neither of them had washed since leaving town. Far as being friends, they’d missed that chance way back. What mattered now was making them useful.

Simra slept easier when he had something in mind. It was the circling nothings, the questions snapping each at one another unsolved, that always kept him awake.

The fourth day broke.

A light brown light showed through the yurt’s walls and woke Simra. A little clay lamp hung from the crux of the roof, bristling with twigs of burnt-out incense. Side by side, Simra and Tammunei lay, surrounded by Simra’s baggage, and what little Noor and Tammunei carried. A patina-green teapot of copper, and an earthenware pestle and mortar. A small slingsack of foraged things: bone and horn, shell and wood and stone.

Simra dragged himself from his bedroll and furled it up. Leaving Tammunei behind, he crawled from the yurt and sat on the lower lip of its flap-doored mouth.

A rare bright sunlight began in the east and the sky there shone like metal. But the ground where they’d set camp was logged with days of rain. Even if today brought no new showers, the mud of the road would remain.

Looking down from skyward, Simra found his boots and pulled them on. They were bird-foot boots, a Redoran style, their toe-caps divided in two. Months he’d had them, and still he couldn’t tell how well he liked the feeling of them. Sometimes their barefoot feel was good. Other times it was better to feel a little further from the ground than they allowed. He nudged his stiff feet into them, shuffled them up over the knee. Tied the red ribbons that kept them in place. The ribbons, at least, he was happy with — he’d made up his mind on that.

Simra reached back inside the yurt to drag out his jacket and mantle, his belts and his bags. No telling what would happen to them if he left them inside when the yurt collapsed itself. Would they sit bulky in the yurt’s furled shape like a snake’s last meal in the sleek of its belly? Tammunei’s things didn’t show like that. The yurt just swallowed them into itself, remembering them, and stored them somewhere outside of space. With Tammunei’s things it seemed natural; with his own, Simra reckoned, it felt like a risk.

The morning air was cold, the sky overhead still a charcoal sketch. Simra stabbed his arms through the sleeves of his sister’s jacket and trudged out into the mud. Two-toed footprints and two-toed puddles; black wet noises through the wet blonde grass. He hitched on his belt and tested the draw of his sword an inch or so out of the scabbard. Smooth and silent for a blighted stupid heavy thing longer than he’d want to use in just one hand. Jamming the bit of naked blade back into the scabbard, it closed with a wooden clap. He put on his scarf and mantle, gathersack and satchel.

The brothers were striking their own tent, strides away. A simple pitch-and-pole, no cleverness to it like with an ashlander yurt. One of them floundered inside under the waxcloth and hide of it. Outside, Galgas set to bundling up its moor-ropes, stowing its pegs.

“We’d be waking up in Othrenis already if not for them.” Noor came parting through the grass to stand nearby. She’d taken the night’s second watch with Bandrys, but now she came from where she’d spent firstlight, out on the plain. Singing, no doubt; scattering bones; seeding ghosts.

“I’d be waking up in Othrenis,” Simra corrected. “You’d be waking up outside it, safe and sound from the wickedness of stone-house folk.” Quick words, but they came out thick with sleep. “Guessing a half-night’s watch with Bandrys did nothing to warm you to him?”

Noor turned on Simra and gave a scowl by way of answer. “Fool thinks I speak no baelathri, and still he talks and talks all the same.”

“And laughs like he’s belching and belches like he’s laughing. Sounds like a fucking drain in a storm-flood either way, right? I know. I’ve watched with him twice to your once.”

“Once is too many. Once is one more than I’d have had to sit through if not for you.” Noor’s throat made a noise that might have been a sigh if she’d only opened her mouth. “They slow us. They worry Tammu. What’s your plan for them?”

Simra shifted his weight, one foot to the other. They spoke in Velothis, so as not to be understood even if they were overheard. Still, it felt strange, talking like this in the brothers’ earshot.

“I’ve had a few,” Simra said. “Been thinking. Trying to put the pieces together. Just not come up with anything that lets me have my bun and eat it.”

“You mean your bounties?” She said the word like the name of some food she could never bring herself to eat — not if you starved her.

“The coin from them, yes. Don’t trust the brothers to share with us, and I’d rather not share with them either.”

“So we leave them on the plain. They’ll never find us, never catch up, not if we ride ahead and leave them walking.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. Thing is, that’s its own rub, right? Without them, best not to chase the bounties at all. Twelve against five with a plan and a few dirty tricks in their deepest pockets — I’d take that gamble. But lose them and it’s twelve against three. I wouldn’t follow me into that.”

“Who said we’d follow you at all, Simra?”

“Carry on with this road, I don’t reckon you’ll have much choice. Those twelve’ll have it staked out. Their hunting ground. That’s one. As for two… D’you need a reminder what two is?”

Simra had watched the brothers all this time, speaking absent to the empty distance just past them. Now he angled his hips and half-turned to face Noor, finding her eyes with his eyes. She owed him. Her life almost for certain; her mind, almost as sure. That’s how Simra saw it. Her gaze shrunk from his and found its way across the grass. Her mouth was a set thin line. Simra reckoned that was as close as he’d come to an affirmation: she recognised the debt, even if she was too proud to give it voice.

“Good,” Simra said. “Besides, food costs coin. And once we’re at Davon’s Watch, then what? Sea in the way of our progress. Crossing that’ll cost us too. You chose this route – you and Tam – and there’s costs that come with that. Someone has to find ways to get them paid.”

“But you still don’t have a plan?”

“I’m working on it,” Simra said, curt. “You wanna work on it too? Talk to Tammunei. There’s another role I need played and I reckon you can play it fine enough.”

A shifting started in the yurt. Subtle, maybe even imagined, but Simra reckoned he scented the start of something new inside: a green and bitter sweetness, like black sugar heated halfway to burning.

“Tammunei’s started,” said Simra to Noor, nodding his head sideways at the yurt. “I need you to do the same. You’ve got a day. I’ll talk to the sweet-natured siblings over there…”


	23. Chapter 23

“We lost time this morning — your little red one lurking in the tent, breathing smoke I’ll say… So how much did we lose? How far?” Bandrys trotted to Simra’s side, feet falling heavy. “To the prize, I mean. How far?”

Simra looked ahead, taking a studied view of the horizon. The road twisted headwards, a mud-black bridge of solid ground in a sea of shivering grass. “Hard to say. No telling where they’re based out of.” A lie, but he made it sound reluctant, careful: an admission.

Galgas walked like a bodyguard, always a few strides behind his brother. Footstep, footstep, and on every third beat came the butt of his polearm, tallying out the leagues. Simra took up the lead, walking likewise, Velothi spear in hand. Beside him, Bandrys kept pace, in a leathery flutter of coat-tails.

“If you don’t know that,” he said, “what do you know? Kept tight-lipped on all this long enough that I’ll say it’s time you shared.”

“I know there’s twelve mer at least want taking in or killing,” said Simra. Bootshuffle. Sharp crush of the spike that butted his spear’s blunt end. “Four named mer amongst them. Meidryn Sadoro, Nephtah Themaryb, Tiamtar – what was it? – Dolgrassur, I think. And Moab the Soup… Most of them not so named that I’d heard of more than one before the last couple days, though.”

“Which was it?” Galgas put in. “The one you’d heard of.”

Simra twisted his neck to look back. Every word from Galgas came like an ambush, and questions worst of all. “The Soup. Get a name based on boiling people alive, guess that name’s more likely gonna travel… And far as I remember, his name’s been travelling – what? – two years?”

“The others?” said Bandrys.

“Nobodies, far as I know. Hangers-on. Petties. They’re two drams a scalp. Four for the named mer. Five drams and three for Moab, last I heard. That’s thirty-three drams and a bit, total. Just less than seven drams each in bounties. Might be less in Othrenis. Might be more. More likely more, seeing as it’s closer and the threat’s more theirs than Ouadabridge’s. Add loot to that as well and it’s pretty enough, as pictures go…”

Bandrys’ eyes flickered skyward a moment and he chewed the inside of his cheek. In time he nodded. “Right. And what about how we find them.”

“Like I said, no idea where they’re based from.” Simra put a clip in his voice. It wasn’t hard to ape frustration around the brothers. “Only word I have’s where caravans start going missing.”

“And where’s that?”

“Four days out from Oudabridge at cart-pace. Last stretch before Othrenis.”

A look crossed Bandrys’ face like a downturned grin. The corners of his mouth pulled tight, lowering to show the cram of his lower teeth and the black-red beginnings of his gums. “And you tell us this now?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re knuckles-deep in their territory, and you tell us now? Gods! And you’re just walking!” Bandrys gave a horselike huff. “Gods..!”

“Heard your brother voice some reservations yesterday,” Simra began, calm as cold water. “Sounded like he was uneasy over Tammu’s role in all this. Reckon you’re uneasy too, thinking I don’t look like I’m looking out, watching for threats after that admission. Wanna know why? It’s cos Tammu’s _listening_.”

“Well…”

“We carry different burdens but we all pull our fucking weight, right? Suggest you look at yourself and ask what yours is — what d’you carry?” A flash went into Simra’s voice, threatening thunder, and then it was gone. “Besides, takes a special kinda stupid to get properly ambushed somewhere like this. Big and broad and flat as a chap’thil board? That’s got a way of giving you fair notice.”

“And that’s your plan, is it?” said Bandrys. “When they ambush us, ambush them right back?”

“Master tracker, are you?” said Simra. “No? Then I’ll take it as read that, far as plans go, you’ve not got a better one.”

They walked a while onward. Simra weighed out the silence, measuring, judging, counting out its contents. Apprehension, sudden uncertainty. That was good. Leave them watching the horizon, not their backs. Leave them doubting his ability, not his honesty. There were truths stitched through all of what he’d said but in the end it hinged on lies: the distance and the day; the nearby threat. This wary new tension was part of his plan. Simra reckoned he’d sown his seeds about right and now he could watch them grow.

“You’re right, though,” he said, stopping to lean with both hands on his spear. “We’ll need edges keen and eyes sharp for all of us.” He paced around the spear-shaft to look backwards at the brothers, the horse and guar, and the two wisewomen. “Being ready for a surprise attack’s a surprise too, and that’s about what we’ve got on our side.”

The others had stopped. Galgas leaned on his polearm. Tammunei shied forward to stand close to Simra, their weight shared unfair between their raggy-booted feet. Around them all, Noor walked a restless circle; small strides and soft-falling feet in her brief simple shoes.

Simra ground his spear into the dirt til it could stand on its own. “Anyone’s got armour to put on, bows to string, I’d say now’s the time.”

He swung his gathersack frontwards on its strap and reached inside to bring out a rolled sheet of kreshweave. A stiff cloth, hardy, a little like linen and a little like waxed paper. He opened out the scroll into a kind of apron and fitted it to the front of his body. A moment’s fumbling as his fingertips searched for the fastenings that would tie it round his neck: a gorget of netch leather, stitched with verticals of steel wire. From there it fell in a ply of shimmering scales, chitin and brass and iron, irregular but overlapping, and threaded onto the tough cloth backing. With a sash that spread out from its sides, it fastened also at the waist.

Flint-eyed, Noor broke the circle she’d been pacing and move to her guar’s flank. She took up the Vereansu bow and belted its quiver round her waist. In her hands she held the bow, but stared up at Simra. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said to him in Velothis.

The tongue had no word for showmanship that he knew. No tradition of play-acting. With no right word to use he fell back on “Performance.”

The bow was a composite: a crooked crescent of blood-dark wood and varnished bone and dried sinew. Noor brought out its string and fitted it to one end of the bow. She began to mutter. The bow flexed and creaked as she spoke. It bent back on itself, straight at first, then further. At her asking it writhed into shape, horning round its arms. Neat and easy, she nocked the string.

“Well…” Bandrys breathed. “I’ll say…”

Noor grimaced and looked up to Simra once more. “Performance.” She hitched up, foot in one of her guar’s stirrups, and threw over a leg to sit on its back.

Galgas untied a helmet from his belt and slotted it onto his head. It was a dome of fluted steel that tapered towards its peak like the root-end of an onion. A curtain of butted rings hung down from its back and sides, decorated with blue cloth tassels, and with open cuts for the tips of merish ears. He untied the cloth cover from his polearm’s head. Beneath was a dagger-thin axehead and a short hammerhead at its rear. Above, following the line of the shaft, a spike jutted upwards.

Tammunei’s eyes were wide and wary. Their posture had stopped shifting and gone stiff, still and brittle as a drawing in pencil. Simra felt it like a vibration to his left.

Bandrys reached into his long leather coat, padded at the arms and shoulders, and brought out what looked to be a bundle of stout sticks. Holding onto one, the bundle fell open. It was a kind of collapsed flail, built like a staff of three sections, each length joined to the last with a few stout links of chain. The middle section was ridged pale hardwood. The outer two were ringed with iron at their tips.

Simra frowned. He’d heard of threshing staffs — read about them, mostly. Field-tools turned to weapons in the hands of farming folk, common before the Red Year but only storied since the start of this era. Since the coming of the peasant-communes and townships that had grown up as the Houses broke down, like mushrooms after rain. Hard to say whether it looked like nothing much, or something simple but deadly. It all depended on how Bandrys used it, he supposed. And in any case, it hardly mattered.

“That better?” Simra asked, troubling over one edge of his chestpiece where a twist of wire stitching had come loose and started to stick him through his shirt.

“I’ll say I’ve worried over worse…”

Through noon and after, on til evening, the waiting worry grew.

Simra began to feel a little of it himself, even causeless and pointless as it was. Fear of the empty horizon, daring it to form up into figures, but dreading it too. He’d made that fear; stitched it together with words and shows. But armoured now, and feeling more than ever the new strange weight of his sword, and edged all round with the others’ alert silence, the tension seeped into him too.

He tried to take it as proof maybe — a sign of work well done. But night fell, and with it the plain closed in. Stars overhead, but the open air immured them, turning black and solid. They stopped at the end of the sunset. Night buried them.

“Nothing…” muttered Bandrys as they laid camp. “All day and nothing. I’ll say, I could stand a fight far better than all this nothing. What are they? Gone? Watching all this time?”

“Could be,” said Galgas.

“Could be,” Simra said. “But they’d need a far-eye or spells to see us while we’ve not seen a thing.”

“Who’s to say they’ve not got either? I’ll say, how would you know?”

Simra didn’t answer. Just kicked together dry grass and dung turned half to fossils. With his soft-soled boots he felt for stones, hidden in the grass, but turned up nothing to hedge the campfire in. He could move the fuel he’d gathered, dig a pit, dump the fuel inside — but that was more work than he wanted.

He spat three times round the fuel-heap, marking three corners as he walked about it, counter-sunwise. He muttered a three-word calling, asking difficult things from the fire he’d light: stability and temperance, both bound together in obedience. Three: a good number for tying things together, strong and staying the same. He shrugged, hoping the spell would hold, but frowned before walking away.

Something had caught. A kind of friction — he’d felt it in his mind as the spell was finished. It formed the start of a shape. He glimpsed it, tried to grasp it, and then with the force of his focus it was gone. He remembered what Noor had said of Velothi sigils: ‘Found things, like spell-songs are.’ Perhaps one had begun to find him…

“And you go about lighting a fire!” Bandrys’ voice broke in on his thoughts. “A fire anyone could see!”

Simra bristled. “Anyone could, but nobody will.”

“Go on. More Ashlander magic, is it?”

“Right. Noor’ll see to it. Hide us.” Simra looked out across their camp – the yurt assembling itself as Tammu sat nearby; Galgas pitching the brothers’ own tent – and found Noor with his eyes. He carried on in Velothis. “Won’t you, Noor? Hide us?”

Noor touched her high forehead in a Vereansu nod. She walked in the night, hands brushing through the grass. Her every move was a whisper, and as she began to sing, soft, the plains whispered back. In time she gestured to Tammu who followed her out of sight.

“Then again…” Simra considered. “If anyone’s already seen us…”

“What? If anyone’s already seen us what?”

“The spell only hides us from stumble-upons. Not from anyone already searching. Shit…” Simra gave a humourless sigh of laughter. “Dunno about you, but I don’t think I’m getting any sleep tonight if I try or not.”

Galgas looked to Bandrys. Bandrys looked back.

“Us neither,” Galgas said. “We’ll watch with you.”

“Was hoping you’d say that,” Simra grinned. Relief made the gesture genuine. A flash of straight teeth through his crooked lips. “They come in the night, reckon we’ll stand a chance after all.”

Above them, the stars blinked out. The night sky turned black and blank as a shadowed ceiling.

Sparks then embers, Simra called the fire to life, coaxing light from the small pile of tinder. All for the better. The day’s cold had deepened. Sun’s Dusk was drawing to a close and the nights would fall in frost. Simra poured from his waterskin into his dark bronze kettle. The skin was slack now, almost empty. For all the rain they’d had, there’d been no standing water but puddles — no way to refill.

“You got water to spare?” he asked.

“Some,” said Bandrys. “What for?”

“I’ve got strong tea. Little bit of alchemy to it. Not enough to be awake all night, we need to be alert all night as well.”

“Tea,” Galgas nodded, walking over to hand Simra a leather water-pouch.

Setting the kettle above the banked flames, Simra took a paper parcel from his gathersack and ate, sparing, from its contents. Dried plum, black dried apricot, dried yellow plum. A dried brown ricecake, flavoured with green herbs.

The water boiled and Simra took it from the fire til the bubbles turned to beads in the flame’s amber light. He took a pouch from his belt. Not the main cake of tea he’d bought in Ouadabridge, but a shaving from it: crumbled black leaves, flecks of blue and flecks of white, speckled through with red and hackle-lo green. He fed half the pouch into the pot, hummed as he considered for a moment, then flaked in the rest to be sure.

“Probably taste like a well something’s died in, I warn you,” he said. “If you reckon you can stay awake without…”

The brothers shared a look again.

“Best not take any chances, I’ll say.”

The tea steeped. Simra brought out a cup. The brothers produced their own earthenware handle-bowls and set them beside the pot.

Simra poured the tea, dark and steaming. In his hand he held another paper parcel, out from his satchel, and poised it over the cups. “Sugar?”

Bandrys kissed his teeth and shook his head. “N’wah.”

“Suit yourself,” said Simra, and sweetened his own cup.

The sugar came out black and shining as jet. Crushed crystals, caramelised to burning, then reset, re-powdered that morning as Tammunei stayed in the yurt. Sugar, spraygrass pods, and whatever else they’d measured in.

‘Clever is the womer who adds always a third part,’ they’d told him. ‘I can’t promise the poison won’t touch you too, but you’ll be spared the worst of it.’

Together, the three of them drank.


	24. Chapter 24

“Bastard!” Bandrys’ voice was a gurgle, gone almost shrill with rage. “That bastard! Those bastards! Fuck them with their forebears’ bones! Fuck!”

A shriek of rage echoed across the plain, pale and thin as dawnlight. The wind blew cold over stiff grass, frozen dew, the frost-mazed sheet of a poor-pitched tent.

“Think there were ever any bounties to start with?”

“I don’t care! I’ll say d’you think I fucking care? Fuck! The n’wah’s fucked us. Off with our purses and into the fucking sunrise? I swear by ash and blood, Galgas…”

Someone spat heavy. Groaned as they made to move.

“Tracks.”

“What?”

“Guar tracks. One set of hooves. The road ahead.” An expectant pause. “Looks like rain today. Be gone later.”

Footsteps tramped across the grass, creaking hoary in the cold.

“How are you so calm? How are you so calm, you bastard!”

No answer. Just the sound of spitting, and one pair of hands fumbling with cloth, rope, hide.

“Fuck the tent! Time’s losing and I’ll say I am not letting that bastard shake us! He can’t have got far and when I find him, I swear…” Another short howl of frustration, like glass heated to glowing, about to shatter and break. It cracked into another gurgle and a hawking spit, profuse and darkly wet. “Go! Let’s go already! Think he can cheat me? Think anyone can cheat me! Fuck!”

Running feet and falling boots. Their gait was clumsy, staggered. The sound rose, then faded away.

At last Simra let himself breathe. His ears rang for the strain of listening, for the briefness of his breath, the hard cold of the ground he lay on. Bellydown in the grass while someone called him a cheat — he ought to have felt every bit the snake, but instead it felt like triumph, relief. They’d taken the bait.

Sunlight broke through the weft of the cloak that covered the three of them. Noor and Tammunei slept next to Simra. Elbows and knees and sleep and fear. Every slow-taken breath scared Simra deeper into silence, afraid they’d make some sound without knowing it and throw the whole plan from its cradle. Still, they’d earnt the rest. They’d walked among the grasses and along the plains, singing together this spell. A large cloak of woven grass, thatched through with charms of concealment to last from night til after dawn. And that was no small thing.

He began to count down. All round was a vast clear flatness. Once he was out from under the cloak there was nothing but the grass to hide him — just a gamble, chancing that the brothers would not look back.

A count of two-hundred shrunk away. The hot taste of copper filled Simra’s mouth again and became thick. It was his gums again. The poison again, same as had plunged the brothers into a deep and dream-plagued sleep, and seen them wake all but bleeding themselves pale through their mouth. It had been kinder to Simra. The agent in the sugar had seen to that, fighting the worst of it off. Still his wrists and ankles ached, stiff beyond the cold. Still, he leaned his head forward and blood poured dark and slack from his lips to drain into the ground. He spat to clear it. Still the taste remained: hot copper, faint black pitch.

Another two-hundred ticked past. It was still a gamble, but the odds were changing. Wait any longer, he’d risk losing them. Noor had unharnessed the guar and horse, and clapped them off up the road ahead, to go where they would. It had set a false trail for the brothers to follow, but also left Simra, Noor, and Tammunei dismounted. The chase would be on foot. But Simra didn’t have to catch them; only keep them in sight.

At last he crawled out from under the cloak and came to a crouch. Behind him, the way he’d crawled, there was nothing to see. Just grass among grass — not invisible, but unremarkable to the barest brink of it.

The wise-ones had done their work well, he thought. What was he next to that? A kit of tinder and kindling. A hedge hung with baubles and bits of magic, and most more shiny than worthy. He’d have found a way alone, he told himself. He always would and always had before. He knew his own recourses against poison and sickness, though none were pretty or came without cost. He pictured himself, daubing runes onto his body as the poison set in; eating ash and chanting til the sickness set in to purge his body. Tammunei’s way had been easier. Folly not to take it when offered… Folly, too, not to seize time by the scruff while it was still on his side.

“Hey,” he hissed. “Hey.” Louder now. “Wake up. It’s time.”

The grass fluttered, like some sudden small wind had shook its stems. Then the sight of it twisted, creased, and split open. Noor gathered herself up from under the cloak and clambered out to crouch beside Simra.

“Stay low,” he said. “Level with the grass.” He jutted a thumb over one shoulder in explanation. Along the road to Othrenis there were still two dark shapes, long-coated, hustling clumsy towards the horizon.

Tammunei crawled to a crouch as well, bleary-eyed, only half-awake.

Cast off now, the cloak had already started to look parched and threadbare. Its edges were ragged, unravelling. As the magic faded, the spell devoured itself, fading out of effect. As with fire, so with all magic — something would always be eaten.

Simra hunkered over to where it had lain and worked through his baggage. His joints complained. His right hand ached between its knuckles, fingers stiff and awkward as he teased open the mouth of his gathersack. He’d not been fool enough to wear the scale chestpiece to lie bellydown against the damp dirt all night. He’d paid through the nose for the blighted thing after all. Now he hurried it on, over the grass-wet cold of his clothes, and picked up his spear from where it had lain all night.

“What now?” said Noor as she strung her bow once more.

“You know what now,” Simra said. “They’re bait, running off ahead. We keep them in sight and wait to see what catches.” He fastened on his belt and bookbag — his satchel with two new purses inside. “D’you hear them earlier? ‘Think there were ever any bounties to start with?’ That was good.”

“You’re smiling…” said Tammunei, shrugging into the carrying straps of their yurt.

“This bit’s about as good as it’s going to get. The rest’s all graft. It’s smile now or start thinking about running after those flatfoots.”

In truth it felt clever and heady. Like throwing fits in Windhelm’s streets so Soraya could cut a few purses. Like throwing a gambit in a game of cards and watching the table as it takes. There was a hungry pleasure in it. Denying it would take a larger lie than Simra wanted to tell himself.

“We ready?” he said. “How’re you for strength? Magicka? You’ll need it.”

Noor looked blank at him and Tammunei said nothing. Hard to say if it was pride, stubbornness, or sleep and the risen sun that had brought them back to strength.

“I’m not chancing you running dry,” Simra said. “You risk yourself, you risk us all. At least take some fucking guljana for the road.”

He shared out the pink-red slices of dried root from his bag and took one for himself. No tea this morning, and little sleep that night. He’d need to borrow what sharpness he could. After that they set off at a trot, single-file, eyes always to the road ahead. No need to outrun the brothers, Simra told himself as his forehead and neck began to prickle and his lungs grew tight and cold. Just watch them and watch the horizon.

The poison lingered, grinding thick in the joints of his hips and knees and making his feet fall awkward. But if it hung on him so heavy, how much heavier would it be on the brothers? It would slow them, he reckoned. And that was one more in a host of reasons to pace himself now.

Noor and Tammunei were the better runners over distance. Simra’s gait was long. Simra’s body wanted to rush. Cityborn, he’d made himself a sprinter even before he was full-grown. But as much as Tammunei was of the Grey Quarter too, they’d lived as Velothi for longer. Where Simra wanted to bolt the leagues down, swallowing them whole, Tammunei and Noor had a knack of chewing them over with pace and patience, and in the long of things that was faster. Simra did what he could to mimic them, but quick the sound of his breath filled his brain til it almost felt like rage.

One league, two leagues, three. Simra’s throat grew ragged with panting. The day lengthened, one hour into the next, but grew no brighter. Grey light and linen skies. Galgas had been right at dawn. It looked like rain.

Four leagues. Tammunei slowed to a halt and gave a long blink as the others stopped too. As if by unspoken command they all moved from the road and half-hid in the grass once more.

“The wind says someone’s coming.” Tammunei spoke, breathless but not broken.

The horizon stuttered to the road’s distant right. There in the south, figures showed dark above the yellow-grey grass.

“There,” said Simra, squinting to southward. “Mounted. Fucking of course they are…”

“At least we’ll be riding the rest of the way,” said Noor. “If we do this the right way.”

Simra’s fingers itched round the shaft of his spear. “Hard to say how many.”

No matter how his eyes strained they gave him no numbers. A memory surfaced, from worlds ago and years away. ‘See anything?’ ‘Fuck… I don’t have special elf eyes, Kjeld…’ Simra swallowed the thought into silence before laughter or tears could seize him.

“This way,” he said, gesturing for the others to follow. “Best make up some distance while we can.”

They stayed low, making away from the road now, towards the horizon the riders had come from.

Sweat prickled at Simra’s neck. It troubled down from beneath his torn earlobe to finish, lost in the faded folds of his patchwork scarf. The ring of dull gold through his left ear felt hot and soft as clay. Winter cold – frost still on the grass and ice still on the road’s black shining puddles – but beneath his clothes Simra was all heat, all blush, all worry.

The riders were taking their time. More playful than patient though. Like wolves stake out their prey, knowing that if it bolts they can still run it down. Like dogs, waiting on that first sign of fear. They rode at a walk, straight for the road. So far as Simra could see, the brothers were trying to keep their pace, but one of them was moving hampered now. The other slowed to match his pace.

“Five,” said Tammunei. “There’s five of them.”

“We carry on til they’re done with the brothers,” Simra said. “They’ll lead back the way they came. Show us where they work from.”

The ache was in Simra’s thighs now, legs bent as they kept on. The tip of his sword’s wooden scabbard dragged along the ground — a rudder through still waters; a ploughshare through soft soil. He fought to keep a hiss of discomfort from his voice.

“What about them?” said Tammunei. “The brothers.”

Simra’s throat caught tight. “If we’re lucky they’ll soften those five for us.” Tammunei seemed about to say something, but stayed silent. “I know that’s not what you’re asking, but it’s too late to wonder now. Best not think on it.”

A whooping wail tore across the plain. It snapped Simra’s head about to stare. It started as one voice but the others took it up.

“Shit…” he hissed.

The riders charged. On the road, the brothers had stopped moving. Distance made black bristles of them, set against the sky, and the riders coursed closer, crying out as they came. In loose order the five of them spread from file and into a loose fan. Further and further from Simra, Noor, and Tammunei, the thunder of their charge turned silent and their warcry drowned in the noise of the wind.

“They have one Vereansu among them,” said Noor. “At least one.”

“You can tell by the wail?”

Noor touched her forehead, agreeing. “Most of them are mimics. Baelathri, thinking it makes them fierce — that a Vereansu can’t tell the difference. But the first at least, where they took their cue, that was real. Angkut clan, by the sound of it.”

“That tell us anything?”

“It means one bow at least and someone well versed in using it from the saddle.”

Simra grimaced. “Reckon you’re better from foot?”

Noor palmed an arrow from the quiver at her hip and nocked it to her bowstring. “We’ll see.”

“Dolgrassur… That an Angkut name, d’you know?”

“How should I know?” Noor hissed, fingers fretting at the flights of her arrow. Not feathers but stiffened leather. “You talk over your fear in hope that it will hide it. Stop. Listen. Watch.”

Simra grit his teeth and tensed his jaw, looking towards the road.

The shapes there whirled, rabbling round. One thrashed dark and panicked against the ground. Another split off, skirting a wide loop about the fight as it unfurled, only to thunder back fraywards. Some dark streak lashed out against the sky, splitting one dark blur apart — a rider knocked from their saddle. But the one who broke away to renew their charge coursed through the fight and out its other side now, a line drawn tight behind them. As they hammered a path away, curving across the plain, another shape struggled on the line behind them, dragged rough and fast through the grass.

Silence was one thing, staying still was all another. Simra’s knees bobbed as he crouched. His fingers twitched like stillness hurt them. Three against five. There was a time he’d have run straight from odds like those. Sometimes it felt like he’d gotten stronger, better. Sometimes it seemed only that he’d gotten greedy. A taste of fast coin and it was hard to ever go back to slow…

Tammunei sat with eyes closed, one hand open to the air. Noor jounced on the balls of her feet, nocking and renocking the same arrow, over and over. Simra felt the stiff lines of his scarred mouth begin to twitch. The stiff and always ache of his right hand’s fingers began to act out. At least one bow, Noor had said. The scarring between Simra’s neck and shoulder knotted too at the thought.

The fight on the road was over.

The rider who’d cast the line led their number now at a walk, back south towards Simra, Noor, and Tammunei. They drew into distance, growing as they came. The line was still taut behind their guar. A lariat, Simra reckoned as they drew nearer and into plain-sight — a rope with a body dragging behind.

A figure staggered on foot, bound up behind another rider. There were fewer mounts now than before. Of the four remaining, one had two to its saddle. By now Simra could hear their voices. A drift of laughter over the land, but not a full five voices in it. There were injured among them, or at least some hurt past humour. Their fighting strength was down. They were tired or else complacent in victory. That was good.

“Noor?” Simra hissed. “The ones doubled up, two to a guar. See them?”

Noor hummed in her throat. It sounded like agreement at first, but drew on, like the start of a song. “When?” she said.

“When we’ve got a sense for their bearing. Where the rest’re holed up.”

Simra tested the balance of his spear and swapped it to his left hand. With his right he slipped the wand from his boot. Better aim that way; a steadier hand, even for all it had been through.

The riders held course. Simra held his breath as they drew level with his hiding place in the grass, then rode at a slow and straight walk past.

“Noor?”

She hummed an acknowledgement.

Tammunei’s breathing had turned hard, eager. Their nostrils flared and their closed lips twitched in the peace of their face. Their other hand was closed round a thing of bone and horn, held together with red woven hair. Simra remembered back to the fight beside the river. He knew what the ghost trapped inside that fetish could do to a body.

Noor was ready. As she drew back her bowstring and loosed the arrow, something began to move in the grass nearby. The arrow took flight in a rush of air. The grass twisted and billowed like the wake of a shark through water. Tammunei’s bound ghost. It followed the arrow across the ground as it streaked throughout the sky.

Noor nocked another arrow and leapt to her feet. Heart in his mouth and ears full of its sound, Simra was up now too. She tilted back her head and gave a whooping wailing shriek as she began to run. In running too, Simra lost track of her. He charged. The world tightened round him, loud and lonely.

The distance narrowed in a rush of thumping foosteps. The sound of a second arrow hushed across the gap.

First, the guar with two riders bucked, tossed its head, fell backwards. It thrashed against the ground, like a mad-made mock of a dustbath. Simra could hear it groaning, begging ground or grass to pull the two arrows from its neck and side. No sign now of its riders.

The others wheeled out. Two split off to Simra’s right, skirting to flank him and Noor.

Another lagged behind. Their mount reared against a rope tied to it. Bandrys had the rope’s far end about his wrists. He pulled, hand over hand, as the rider struggled to untie it. The rider yanked a blade from their waist. In one silent moment, they rode down the length of the rope. The blade flashed once, biting hard. Bandrys stopped struggling.

The rider circled about, hacking down once more to loose the rope. Wind-troubled white hair, patchwork chitin armour, knees and off-hand straining to get their pony back in rein as it bucked and fought nervous circles through the grass. They raised their sword, bellowed, and spurred towards Simra. Then the air streaked dark. A long war-arrow bristled sudden from under the rider’s raised arm. The horse charged on in a lather of panic. Sixty paces, fifty, forty and closing.

Simra snarled a calling as he raised his wand. Four words formed still and clear in his mind and scorched his tongue when spoken. He jabbed the butt of his spear into the ground and felt the spell run free. A hungry draw on him, half-consuming him as the grass where his spear had struck began at once to smolder. Fast as oil-soaked cloth it took and billowed into hungry sparks. Not flame but bitter black smoke to blind the flanking riders. Bows, Noor had said — at least one.

But the charging rider had passed the sword to their other hand. Another arrow sparred out now from their thigh. Thirty paces, twenty, eyes flashing pain and murder, foam bearding the horse’s bared teeth.

Simra breathed deep, stood still, turned profile. Took aim as the smoke set in. Eyes stinging, he fought to keep them open just a moment more, and joined the runes on the wand. It jolted in his hand. The air screwed and blurred. A whirling force threw the rider at last from their saddle. As they struck the grass, Simra threw himself aside. The half-mad horse flew past and ghosted into the smoke.

“Breathe…” Simra heard himself say. He clambered onto his knees, thrusting the wand back into his boot. Bright and light his limbs, dizzy with distant pain. Head full of roaring silence. “Breathe and up. Get the fuck up…”

But his breath stung and choked him. Acrid smoke, fuelled more by magicka than by the burning plain. Someone, somewhere, started to scream. On knees, then knees and hands, then two running feet, he charged towards the sound and out from the smoke.

Blinding grey sunlight. The world blurred through Simra’s streaming eyes. Already the air was a-reek with blood. Simra dashed for the first figure he saw. Spear levelled in both hands, Simra shrieked, going for the rider’s flank. A dreamlike moment. The spear sunk into the rider’s side, and sunk Simra back through memory. A courtyard of mud and bodies and Moridene twisting on the ground. Then the spearhead carried the rider through the air to falling and their weight ripped the shaft from Simra’s hands as the guar bolted from beneath them.

On the ground they scrabbled like a pinned moth. Simra reached past his scabbard and to his knives instead. His fingers closed round a leatherbound handle. A spearhead once, with him since childhood, reforged into something leafbladed now, stiff-spined — sharp as he went to ground and stabbed point-down into the struggling figure.

Resistance at first. A hand raised against his dagger. A messy parting of delicate bones; dagger through desperate hand. Then the stubborn flex of mail. Then the savage accident of Simra’s point finding its way past the armour — to softness and opening skin.

After that there was nothing. No motion beneath Simra. Not even screaming anymore in the distance. Simra sat on his haunches, fist loose round the point-down grip he’d taken on his dagger. His shoulders shook. Sweat burned stiff on his scalp and shoulders.

He blinked the smoke from his eyes. On his scaled chest and the side of his neck and his jaw’s outward corner, blood was starting to dry. Messy handprints, smeared in blame-bright red.

By rights this was only half a victory. By numbers, less than half.


	25. Chapter 25

Dying has its own scent. Different from rot and from bloodspill, the moment itself, the close-by before, the immediate after, all have a scent of their own. Simra knew that well enough. Place and time might subject the reek to their subtleties. Scaleskins dying in the humid heat of the far south, the Blackmarsh borderlands. Dunmer letting go their misty last breaths in a salt-scented Ebonheart winter. Subtle differences, but they were sibling things all the same.

The scent of dying had gone from this place and turned to the stench of death. A sour complexity, unfinished and final. Bodies becoming bodies as they voided themselves; let slip dignity, let slip life, then let slip warmth and what came after.

Simra sat on the shape of a hide and wicker shield. He’d found it, abandoned in the fighting, face-up on the grass. The whole place felt tainted with the taste of death. Habit kept him from sitting down on the ground at the best of times. Here, he was scarce willing to stand on it. Wrongsoil, blood-tainted, bile-tainted. How could Tammunei feel and hear death all around them, always, and yet feel none of this revulsion? How could they be surrounded by something this and not get lost in it?

Animals die with abandon, Simra thought. No lies with them about the pain of it, the shame of it, the rushing sea-dark fear of it. A guar wails. Its voice becomes a dry grinding sound and then no sound at all. Its head stretches up, neck long and frail, then falls beneath the weight of its head. And in the grass, the corpse is already half-eaten, hidden by the dry-blonde stems. Simple, honest, shameless.

But people put on shows. It’s not that we see clearer and closer to the truth of things, Simra thought. That’s not what makes for people. That’s not all it takes. It’s the lies we tell ourselves, and live by. We see the truths and turn away. We live in their shadows, and say we don’t mind the shade.

He remembered the last rider to die. Legs crushed, caught them under the bulk of the guar that Noor had shot from under him. Still he’d struggled the ruin of his lower body out from its flank. Hand over hand, grinding-slow like climbing a cliff-face, he’d clawed his way through the grass. No telling if he was crawling towards some hopeless hope of escape, or else to seize some scrap of revenge. But Simra remembered his face. The lines of his old features flushed dark. The long dun-black whiskers of his beard, dragging themselves full of dry grass and spilt blood. Knowing this could only end one way, the old mer fought through pain and certainty, empty eyed and with hate held tight in his gritted teeth. And Simra had opened his head. One running blow from his heavy-bladed sword.

Except for that old mer the others had died quick. One bleeding out from her injuries beneath the survivor’s guar. One stuck through with two arrows and struck by Simra’s wand, ribs screwed in to crush and pierce the soft parts they were meant to protect. One carried at spearpoint down from his guar and finished on the ground with a knife. One last lay mangled by Tammunei’s leashed ghost, a few red feet of throat spooled out from their neck like they’d been dragged by it, then discarded.

On his shield-seat, Simra hunched over his work and did what was needful. Red hands, but no sense cleaning them. Not til the dirty work was done. Needle and twine, needle and twine, he threaded five grey ears onto a length of rough string.

He’d gone about, sleepwalker-slow, checking each dead face against the woodcut and clayprinted handbills he kept in his bookbag. Seemed he’d been right. Dolgrassur was an Angkut name. The name of a dead mer now.

“Five ears makes five bounties. One for a named name,” he said. Better to think aloud than let his thoughts run wild in silence. He could slow them this way; censor himself. Better to think out loud. Busy hands and busy mind.

Noor knelt nearby, working with a knife to cut her arrowheads from Tiamtar Dolgrassur’s body and thigh. Already the corpse was missing one ear, and a shined-shell stud from the lobe of the other. “Are you happy now?” she said.

“It’s twelve glass drams, give or take, once we’re at Othrenis.”

“You say this like it ought to mean something.”

“What it means is we’ve got enough to charter a boat once we’re at Davon’s Watch.” Mouth twisting, Simra set down the string of grizzly trophies on a scrap of cloth cut from a bandit’s ruined shirt. Pockets, bags, saddles, he’d gone through them all and searched out their salt. All of it lay on that cloth-scrap now. A half-gleaming heap of sea-grey and shining white; a bed beneath the string of severed ears. He gathered the cloth’s edges up to make a pouch and tied it off with the last of the twine. “It’s enough for passage to Molag Mar…”

He turned the idea over in his mind. Asked questions of its angles and underbelly. Enough.

Ears waiting on transmutation at the hands of a smalltown clerk; gristle to be turned into glass. Enough.

He looked over the rest of what lay before him: the spoils of what they’d done here, grouped and arranged neat as the tables in a scrivener’s ledger. A polished shell earring; a string of clay and lacquer prayer-beads, blue then red then black, then blue and over again. A necklace formed like a cascade of bronze plates that hung from a plaited string of beads the colour of copper patina. A clay flask of strong drink: sujamma, as far as any batch of sujamma was like any other. A lacquered wood box of birch-tar. A little oval luckstone, glazed ceramic, painted with a purple pattern of anther leaves that twined and entwined on a backdrop of white. An enamelled kindling-kit, the inside of its lid painted with a cameo of a red-headed mer, and inscribed with a bad verse in formal Dunmeris: ‘in every fire that lights my nights / let me remember my spark.’ Enough.

Already he wore a new bangle on his left wrist: a band of indigo bronze, smooth on its inside, and with nine hammered sides facing out. Each facet was etched with an eye; five open, four closed, all shaped like diamonds and scratched into the metal by a hand less skilled than the one that had first forged the bracelet. Enough.

And then there were the arms, the armour. A short dagger-headed axe. Another curved Vereansu sabre. Eighteen decent arrows in a waxcloth quiver and an etched leather bow-sheathe, from one rider’s broken bow. A dirk of shaped and sharpened chitin, blue-black and shining. A helmet formed like a hood of oil-black mail with a peak of red-painted bonemould, articulating down to cover the forehead and shade the eyes. Five pairs of boots. Enough.

“It’s enough,” Simra said again. But the words had no force except a kind of sadness. “Dunno that we need to risk the other six bounties. Dunno that I want to, today.”

Hard to remember now if it had always been this way. There was a rush in it: lying, fighting, chancing it all for the gain. The lavish almost-pride he could take in violence, but only in violent moments. But it always seemed more than it was; more, before it began. The killing came easier, but after it was done there was always a waiting edge, easier still to fall from.

Simra’s mouth was dry. A slip of tongue flickered out to wet his lips. He set his spine. Made his whole body stiff to stop the slouch of his back, the start of a shudder in his shoulders. He stood and clasped his shaking hands — stilled them, with each hand a tight violence against the other, like holding down a rabbit to wring its neck. He felt the bones grind. Felt a third hand close around his wrist. A cold length of terror slid under his ribs, parting skin from bone to get to his heart.

“Not real. Not now.” Simra balled shut his eyes. Opened them again, hard, filling them up with the here and now. “Not now.”

Noor was staring at him, up from beside the body. “What?”

A flush blazed on Simra’s neck. “Nothing,” he snapped, stamping over to the corpse and snatching up its waterskin. He upended it over his hands, one by one, scouring the blood from both. His eyes searched starving for something to fill his mind with. Focus before the panic came. Not now. Please not now.

Tammunei laboured a short call away from Noor and Simra. Arms under the arms of a body, they hefted its bulk up, dragging it backwards, heave by scraping heave. The body had hair the colour of yellow ivory. A leather longcoat. A head half-ruined at one side by the downward strike of a sword. Bandrys.

Galgas knelt nearby, still roped tight around the arms with a braided leather lariat. “Leave him! Stop!” His shrieks came ragged from a blood-soaked mouth. Clothes, face, scalp — everything about him was torn. The riders had dragged him to pieces when they dragged him across the plain. But Galgas was still alive and hysterical with it. “Stop touching him!”

For all Galgas’ screaming, Tammunei heaved Bandrys away and laid him down, arms folded on his body’s barrel chest. “He deserves rites. I can give them to him,” they said in slow gentle Dunmeris.

“Get your hands off my brother, you filth! All of you! All of you!” Galgas staggered to stand, arms still bound. He fought against the rope. Fought a few steps towards Tammunei when the rope proved too much for him.

Tammunei took a half-step back, head angling down, red hair half-covering their face. Shrinking body, shrinking pose, they backed away from the corpse and the corpse’s brother.

“Bastard! It’s you! You did this to us!”

“I did this to you,” Simra barked, blunt-sharp as flint. Striding over, he stood at Tammunei’s sloping shoulder and stared Galgas into stillness, five strides from them both. This would do, he told himself. This would do for a mask to wear, to hide from himself for a time. “Don’t look at them. Don’t you dare look at them. Look at me. I did this.” Simra jabbed a finger into his own chest. “I did this to you. But only as far as you didn’t do this to yourselves.”

“Fetcher! Fucker! I’ll pull your fucking teeth!” Pink spit sprayed from Galgas’ mouth. He broke back into motion and made to charge, not knowing what he’d do to Simra, to Tammunei — only that he needed his hands on him.

Simra had seen that kind of rage before; had felt that kind of rage before. He knew not to gamble against it. He raised a pointing finger. “Galgas, by your name be bound!” he barked. Old words, old Dunmeris, a dialect hard and legal. He made his hand a cage. The words, the name, the gesture formed the shape of the spell and it snatched at Simra’s insides, stinging like hunger as it went.

Galgas’ eyes gaped wide and red, sore-pink round his lids, his running nose, his drooling ground-cut mouth. He stumbled as his legs turned strange, his limbs stiff and his muscles slack.

“By your sins be weighed,” Simra hissed.

Bones and flesh, clothes and armour, all of it hung heavy with the press of the spell. Temple magic, Ordinator magic, used to run down criminals, fugitives. Telling, that the spell paid no mind to innocence. Galgas lay slumped, face half-flat to the ground. He was silent now too, tongue too heavy to lift from the bloody floor of his mouth.

“Listen.” Simra walked over to Galgas, crouching down by his head. His voice was quiet, patient as only cruelty can be. “I know what you’re thinking. You think I enjoy this. You’re thinking, how could anyone enjoy this? Any right-minded person. But that’s just the thing. I’m not like this. Not on the ordinary. I’m a reasonable person. But following some poor bit of scrawn from a cornerclub to the first alley you find, hoping for an easy jump — that’s you and your brother, isn’t it? You and him, on the fucking ordinary. You look at me, you follow me, you turn that sad little act on me. If anything’ll make my right-mind go quiet for a bit, it’s that.”

Eyes livid, Galgas could only stare up at Simra. A small strained noise fought free of his throat.

“If anything’ll kill my pity dead, it’s your greedy fucking gullibility. Threaten me? Insult my friends, insult my blood, and you think after all that I’ll still play nice? Would you have done the same? Fuck…”

Tammu crouched next to Bandrys and made to pick up a handful of dust to start the rites they’d promised.

“Leave him!” Simra snarled, knotting the muscles of his neck with how hard his head snapped round. “Leave him for the racers and the buzzards and the crows. Leave him for his brother.” He kissed his teeth and looked down at Galgas. “He ran straight into this. Chose this, far back as Ouadabridge, and chose every turn along the way. You followed, like I reckon you always have. But all along, remember it was Simra Hishkari leading you both by your greed; keeping you blind on your blindness. And if I told you the pleasure I got from this was just professional, I’d be a fucking liar.”

Simra forced the worst grin he could muster onto his face. Bared teeth and broken lips; scars and cold-brewed cruelty.

“I robbed you, used you. Just like you would have done to me. I benefited from you. But you’re wrong if you think that makes me just as bad as you. It’s not that I’m the better man. It’s just that I’m nothing like you, Galgas. I am so – much – worse.”

Simra eased up from his crouch and turned on one heel to walk back to the pile of spoils.

“Give it an hour and you’ll be able to move again. Another while and you’ll be out from that rope. Deal with your brother, do what you want. Just have the good fucking sense not to follow me again, Galgas. Learn, live, and remember.” Drained by spells, fight, false-facing, it was all Simra could to keep the crow in his voice. His face had already slackened, tired and unsmiling. “Noor, Tammunei, pack this lot and round up their mounts. We’re done here.”

The pit of Simra’s stomach was sour. The tread of his feet was heavy. This is you, he told himself. This is what you do. Perhaps things would be easier if any of it was true. His hands at least had stopped shaking. The pressure round his wrist had gone. When the panic came, what else did he have to feed it but lies? Pieces of himself? He’d lose no more of them.

Half-stripped corpses and a swathe of blackened grass. Soil gone dark and rich with blood beneath a smoke-fed sky. On a pair of guar, the three of them rode away.

Simra slouched behind Tammunei in the saddle. Hands tight as terror on their waist, head heavy on their shoulder. He breathed in the blue-grey scent of Tammunei’s knotted red hair and stared over the plains in silence.


	26. Chapter 26

_Shurfa, Balambal, Medis and me. The city sleeps around us. But the city has slept for a hundred years and almost a hundred more. How long, I wonder, before folk started footpadding round it? Stepping soft as soft, to make homes in the hollows of its slumbering body and take tiny bites from its flesh? We’re among their number now. Urn-breakers, grave-robbers, Tammunei said. But we skulk lower still, hiding from the living and from the dead and from the city itself. And as for Tammunei, we left them behind._

_No racers in the sky anymore, not so close to Vvardenfell. Only the sometimes-sounding voice of a gull, raucous towards the citadel edge where they make their nests in the cliffs. Only the raucous uprise and downfall of salt-shrikes, from their colonies in the citadel’s high places. Otherwise the skies are empty, a close and cloistered white._

_My breath makes mist as I walk._

_Three days since we split off from the main procession, out to scavenge. The first day finished in hollow luck. Salt-stained and strewn with the crackling death of dry seaweed where the Red Year made the sea rise up to flood Old Ebonheart’s streets, we found a backstreet spicer’s shop. A wealth of sealed urns and jars; smoked salts, powders in every colour; fragrant seeds. Even a trove of coins in shils and ceramics and green-black trueglass. But spices alone can’t feed you, and with no way of trading, nor can coin. I took for myself a little of each all the same. For habit or hate of waste, I can’t say which._

_My breath mists as I walk, and after the two-day shadow of that empty fortune, I am desperate. I am desperate in deploring this place. A city of stillness, shadows, shattered things. A city where every street leads nowhere. Where wealth and luxuries count for nothing. Where spice is only dust, and coin is only metal in shapes that have no use. And yet we saw life here. Not just animals, or the moving dead, but thinking feeling black-souled life. Or thought we did. There’ve been no signs since then. I wonder if Balambal’s brother didn’t see a ghost. It seems a simpler explanation. If people make their lives here, the glaring question is how?_

_“There.”_

_Balambal points a way out of the blind alley we’re walking. A stubborn section of wall stands up from a building gone elsewise all to rubble. As a facade it’s still grand, in its way. Three even-sided triangles, side by side in sequence. The outer two are screened off with what’s left of a wooden latticework: interlocking triangles, each leading into a nook in the stone behind. Still a scant few scraps of ribbon flutter on the frame, tied once like prayers, and since worth too little to be scavenged away. The middle triangle is an archway, an open doorless doorway, leading on to nothing but wreckage._

_“Temple,” I say._

_“Once maybe,” says Medis. “Before the false gods proved false in their godhead; nothing but masks for the Princes’ glory, worn until their people were strong enough to see the truth.”_

_“In the ending of the words is the true way revealed,” Shurfa says, and signs herself down her body: head, heart, and belly._

_“Hadn’t reckoned you for the pious type,” I say to her._

_She looks back blankly. “Why’d I not be?”_

_I feel the new knowledge like a watched wariness, fixed in the floor of my chest. I don’t know why. What have my near-nineteen years taught me of the Dunmer’s former gods, or the come-again old ones worshipped now? Festivals in the Quarter. Mazes of veils and curtains for Mephala the Spinner; Boethiah’s priests in their two-faced masks; the ululating shrill of prayers across the Quarter in the dusk and dawn processions for the Twilight Queen. But I’ve encountered little devotion, little faith. And feeling it at my side now fills me with something like worry._

_Balambal juts a thumb at the doorway, half-interested, and speaks in Dunmeris: “In?”_

_“To steal?” says Shurfa, tip of her longclub resting against the ground as she shakes her head. “I won’t. A temple’s a temple.”_

_“Even when its gods are false?” I say, more curious than contending._

_“Might not be gods anymore. Might never’ve been gods to start. Still I can’t name a saint that’s higher than Seht, Ayem, or Vehk,” Shurfa says. “Place is still holy some way or another, and I believe that’s that.”_

_Balambal takes another few steps towards the doorway. I look to Medis. The young priest’s face softens further with a smug light as he closes his eyes and speaks:_

_“All saints, great and small, are slabs on the road to the truth. To walk the true way, you must step over them.”_

_It seems like sophism to me, but towards a practical end. I clap my hands together once. “You heard the priest.”_

_With a practised gesture, Medis moves his long queued braid to fall over one shoulder, with the back of his hand. His heavy lidded eyes open, gleaming with some triumph too large by far for the small victory he’s won._

_Inside is wreckage and rubble. Roofless, more like a scree-hoarded hillside than an empty building. A bronze brazier half-buried in the wreckage. The shattered parts of a broken stele, just gleaming fractions of basalt now, carved with illegible words. The scent of old ceremony still clings to the air. Incense, balming-spirits, fragrant-burning firestones. Or am I imagining it? Inventing visions from older days._

_The scree and rubble slopes into the remains of a spire. It towers above the ruin, not-quite-solid and not-quite-straight. Ruin and rag-pickers, we’re all in its unsafe shadow. A cavemouth yawns from the rubble-slope and leads down beneath the earth. A child-high hole, or a tunnel tall enough to stoop through._

_I pick over the rubble with scrambling strides til I’m almost at the tunnel-start. Hard to tell if the depths are dug out or natural-made. Old Ebonheart is full of sinkholes and crevasses where the Red Year opened the earth and left it yet unhealed. Bracketed against one wall of the cave is a little redware lamp, mouth black with soot._

_One step further into the cavemouth, I feel a strangeness on my skin. “It’s warm. Warmer as you go.”_

_Somewhere above the entrance, a wind-chime sounds, high in the spire overhead._

_“Wanna chance it?” I say, jabbing a thumb over my shoulder at the tunnel._

_Balambal shrugs._

_“Better to be hungry and warm than hungry and cold,” says Medis. “If we’re to search anywhere, it might as well be out of the wind.”_

_Shurfa wears a look of apprehension. She lets down her longclub and its head strikes the ground with a studded chunk of sound. Leaning on it, she hangs and shakes her head. “I mislike this.”_

_“Not asking you to like it. Just to do it. Reckon you don’t like starving or freezing either.” I turn and move to the tunnel’s edge. Reach out to touch at the lamp. My finger comes away black and I rub it against itself, feeling for the texture as it offs onto my palm. “Soot’s fresh.” I take the lamp from its bracket and shake it. “No oil though. Must get refilled. Someone comes here. Time and again, I reckon. Must be a reason.”_

_“I mislike the feeling of this,” Shurfa says. “Spit on the reason, it’s the someone that gets at me. We oughtn’t be here.”_

_I replace the lamp in its bracket. We won’t need it. “We’ve seen people. Have to be feeding themselves, sheltering themselves somehow. This could be storage or who knows what. I don’t wanna go without finding out.”_

_“If that’s so,” says Shurfa, “well, why’d they not watch it?”_

_“Then watch them back. You won’t go in? Fine. Stay. Keep an eye out. You as well, Balambal. Medis and me’ll go down and see.”_

_“If you don’t come back?” says Balambal, already settling to sit on the slope’s wreckage, waiting._

_“Give it two hours. If we’re not back then, go back to the rest. Tell Tammunei and tell everyone to get going — this place isn’t safe and would sooner see the backs of us.” I exaggerate. That’s the way luck works. Whatever you prepare for’s whatever won’t happen, so always prepare for the worst. Hope by pretending to have none. “Medis? A light, please.”_

_We step into the cavemouth. Into its red-throat warmth. Medis chants three old and prayer-like words and a violet light bathes us. No solid core of light, nor any cold flame such as I summon. More an incandescence that, sourceless, has insinuated itself into the air round our limbs. Like we ourselves are radiant._

_The chime sounds again in the wind. The toll of metal teeth as this mouth closes round us._

_Step by step we sound the depths. The tunnel slopes short, then corkscrews down straight and sudden through the earth. We stoop the way and soon we’re made to crouch. My shoulders hunch against the ceiling; my hands paw and drag on the ground. But the walls of the tunnel are solid and almost smooth, like gritty plaster or daub._

_Running the secret ways of the Grey Quarter, I’d squeezed through worse. The crawl-tunnels and waste-ways that led off from spinner’s shops and laundries; darkness and dust and a textile haze in the air. I’d known mer who’d lived in warrens worse and called them home. The tight dark of this place holds no dread for me. The only bother’s in how the floor scuffs my knees. But the tunnel comes straight now, no further down, but tighter with every inch we crawl. There comes a time when too much is too much. It comes sooner for Medis than me._

_He stops behind me. “I can’t…” his voice is quiet and thin. “Not any further. Not enough to breathe.”_

_“Turn back then.” Speaking, I taste a runnel of sweat corner into my parted mouth. The heat has got stifling. Blood-hot, flesh-warm; like a body asleep all round us. “I won’t stop you. Only…” I feel something ahead. Not quite a breeze but more motion than the hard-packed air has in this tightest point of the tunnel. “Wait.”_

_I call my own magelight, hunkering onto my elbows and knees to cup my hands and whisper the spell to life. It glows red, an unfuelled ember; a lampless lamplight, burning cold. With a breath and half-bound gesture, I send it forwards. In a ring of cold-smouldering red, it carries my sight down the tunnel. Then the ring breaks open wide. The tunnel ends in emptiness._

_“It opens out ahead,” I say. “Just a little further. More air that way. I promise.”_

_“I can’t.”_

_“Yes you can. There’ll be more space for you sooner if you carry on than if you turn back.”_

_“Back?”_

_“Back through all those tight-screwed tunnels. Remember? Just a little further, and you’ll straight your back and breathe your fill.”_

_“Only a little?”_

_“I promised, didn’t I?”_

_I start to crawl. I hear Medis shuffle behind me, whimpering breathless all the while._

_The last bodylength, I crawl on my belly. Crawling towards daylight, I could do it unthinking, but making only towards the uncertain glow of my magelight, I feel a flash of fear — some short and catching shadow of what Medis feels to my back. My breath catches thick and heavy. I grit my teeth. Writhe, squirm, hard daublike dirt on either side of me. Strange-smooth, no purchase. For a moment I’m stuck. Then I’m born like a worm out into the open and pull Medis by the hands to join me._

_He lies on his back, panting, eyes closed. With time his breath comes slower._

_My eyes are open though, and all for the world around me. Compared with the tunnel, it’s an enormity. The smooth almost-gleam of its daub-like walls, worn and worked til the earth is nearer ceramic than soil. In the darkness outside my magelight’s glow, there are glimmers and gleams, above and all round. Jade-green in shuffling arrays, like constellations crawling through the night. A warm and nascent orange, pulsing strange in places, like firelight glowing through the hide of a yurt’s walls. Hot as a living body, this place, and full of the sound of motion._

_“Medis?” I’m on my feet, reaching for my sword, putting Firecalling words on the tip of my tongue. “There’s things here. Moving.” The start of fear hurries my words. “Think I see eyes. Priest?”_

_A belly-shuffling something sounds its way towards us. I draw my sword with a jerk of my arm. It reaches towards us and into the light, like the searching finger of something far larger than itself. An armoured worm, long as my forearm, shelled all round in lapping plates like a lobster; legless and shell like leather. Three bright-black eyes stare back from a headless head, set over a round and leechlike mouth._

_It writhes up onto its backmost plates and seems to stare. I stand frozen still and watch the glint of my magelight red the black shine of its eyes._

_“Lower your sword, outlander,” Medis sighs. There’s a safety in his voice. A calm that’s almost smug in how our nerves have reversed in role. “It’s only a forager.”_

_“…a kwama?”_

_“Are you surprised? This is an egg-mine.” Medis gives a sharp outbreath of a laugh. “Huh. They have an egg-mine, and beneath an old temple. Our saints sustain us still…” Another snort of laughter._

_“It’s not wild then? That thing’s tamed?”_

_“Domesticated, yes, after a fashion. The queen is tamed. She knows the scent of her miners, and knows it means feed, cleaning for her sometimes. So the hive is tamed as well. ‘That thing’ would have attacked at first scent of you otherwise. The question is, why does it think you smell like a miner.”_

_I frown. Look down at my hand, still soot-stained. The black has stuck to it, like a residue, a resin. “Must be my honest face and open nature…” Sweat beads my brow and fills my clothes like a mist. “This means food. They’re farming here, good as. I’d ask who, but time’s short, and long night’s make a better time for asking questions without straight answers. You know anything about mining for eggs?”_

_“Not such that I’d consider advising anyone, but…”_

_“But what? I’m asking you to advise me.”_

_“I read an allegory once. ‘As the kwama feeds on dirt, so from dirt does the egg-miner feed us all; As the kwama makes its architectures of ordure, so too we must remember how truth first came from dung.’”_

_“I’m all for the manifold uses of book-learning but…what did it teach you about the actual mining?”_

_“As I gather…you take the eggs and you put them in a basket.”_


	27. Chapter 27

_A great cavern of atrium, sides trenched like the kernelpit of a peach. In red and lambent violet we saw what tunnels led off it. Veins and arteries off from an old stiff heart; roots from the bulb of some tuber’s slow growing. We didn’t venture far. There was no need. Miner-baskets lay in piles against one strange-grooved wall, each heaped into the one beneath it so they stacked in fives and threes, sixes and eights. Tiers of coiled roughshod wicker._

_“Think they found this wild?” I asked as we worked. “The kwama just set into the city when it emptied of people?” Sweat on my arms and in the spine-furrow that cleaves my back. In the heat of the mine, I forgot that the world above was all winter. “Or did people set in and plant all this, for food? How’s it work? Is an egg-mine something you seed or something you stumble on?”_

_“Ask the farmer,” Medis said._

_And we gathered what eggs we could. What eggs we could mattock and trowel out from the lodgings where they grew bubonic against the wall-grooves and floor, and hung stalactite from the ceiling. The egg-lodgings disgusted me worse than the eggs, the kwama, the tight and blood-warm darkness of the mine itself. Not quite meat nor quite earth, they raised like proudflesh, like scar-tissue, in growths and beds from the dirt of the place. Tooling free the eggs from it felt more like surgery, butchery, than mining._

_Kwama milled about us, in all the seeming aimlessness of intense and focused labour._

_The come and go of foragers, long and shorting the plates of their shells to writhe forward. Not like snakes who tacks towards progress, sideways, then sidewards, then sideways again. More like some nameless muscle, moving in throbs and contractions as they left off down the side-tunnels._

_And the hunchbacked workers, four-footed and sturdy, with their chins like ploughshares and their hollow tunnel-faces. Their two pairs of petty arms beneath the great lob of their heads. Blind jade eyes down the length of their plate-jagged bodies. Around us they dug, and scaled along the grooved walls, and daubed the cavern’s sides with black secretions that shone in our magelights and set hard as lacquer._

_But we filled our baskets. One each, with leather-shelled eggs some big as melons, others small enough to hold in one hand. Pushing them ahead, we stooped and crawled back down the tunnel. Up the tunnel. Around the tunnel as it screwed to the surface._

_I feel the air first. The cold of the real world, where winter still reigns, outside the mine’s strange dream. It breezes against my face and I think the wind-chime chimes again._

_The light that breaks across my eyes is little light at all. The sun’s begun to sink already. Ablaze, my first sight of sky. The tunnel spits us out and onto the temple wreckage, and above the night spreads like a bruise while orange clings to the west. Long shadows stripe the ruin floor, lean and smooth as ink over all the rubble-roughness._

_“Believe you were more’n two hours,” says Shurfa, leaning out from one of the shadows. “We waited anyways.”_

_“Goes deep,” I say by way of explanation, if not apology._

_“Thank you,” says Medis._

_“Fucking tunnels,” I say. “Worth it though for what we found. It’s a fucking egg-mine down there. Tamed. Look!” Our two baskets are fuller of eggs than any one person could carry without aching, rest-stopping, sweating through their clothes even in winter. “Shunted them all the way back up.”_

_“Not a bad harvest for two cityfolk,” says Shurfa._

_“Think it’ll do for the rest? How many meals in a kwama egg, anycase?”_

_“How long’s a rope. How tall’s a tree. But biggest you got there, well I’d say as it’s a sixty-cell egg.”_

_“So that’s a yes then. Least until we make the mainland.”_

_“If we’re chary.”_

_“Reckon we’ll have to be.”_

_“I don’t understand,” says Balambal. He’s been chewing something over in his head, maybe since before we came back. His words come like a worry he can’t keep in anymore. “This place would feed six families well. Here, that’s more valuable than anything. Why is it not guarded?”_

_“It’s hidden,” I shrug, but take his point. “Did you see anyone up here? Anything?”_

_“Silence and the moving sky.”_

_“Maybe they’re gone. Something happened to them.”_

_“What they deserve,” tuts Shurfa, “egg-mining a temple of the old Tribunal. What we deserve too, like as not.”_

_“Admissions and atonements will feature in my prayers tonight,” says Medis. “But for now we’d best not ling—”_

_The air breaks with a thupp. A stout wooden something stands out from Medis’ neck and the tunnel-ragged front of his pilgrim’s robes are coming in black. A growing stain like a lengthening shadow. He paws and presses at the crossbow quarrel, an agony of surprise in his searching hands, and on his blank sudden face. Tries to pull it out. No telling if the raw suck of sound that comes is the voice of the wound or him trying to speak._

_His magelight blinks out. He slumps forward. The world’s lit only in red now._

_Curse and clamour, we split off from each other in panic, exploding towards what cover we can find. Shurfa to the temple’s one standing wall. Balambal to the gloom of the tunnelmouth._

_I bound up the wreckage-slope that leads towards the spire. Try to remember Medis’ facing, the bolt’s angle. Coming up almost empty, I trust myself to a half-guess and corner round the spire’s nightward side._

_“No flights!” Balambal’s voice calls from below. “No flights on the quarrel! It came from close!”_

_My light’s come with me, leaving the temple-floor in half-darkness and me haloed round like a beacon. “Fuck…” I close the spell in my mind and stand obscure, against the towerside and against the purpling sky. I pull my sword and hold it ready._

_In the shadows a steamlike hissing comes running through the black. Closing it starts like a harsh whistle, many-mouthed, to the sound of scurrying feet. Not a dog, but knowing nothing of nix, I default to the same fear._

_“They’ve got nix!” I shout. My second trust to guesswork of the night._

_“Simra!” I hear Shurfa bellow. Hear the sound of bodies shuffle-struggling against stone. “Light! Unkill the light, blight it!”_

_I turn towards the scurry as it gains on me. Third guess. I bark a calling word. Flames glare out from my left hand. The shape of something many-legged and lean scuttled on itself sears into my eyes after the flare’s gone out. Half-blind, I still see sparks clinging to something moving. I strike for it, Hlaalu blade singing long through the air as it clacks against hardshell, softshell, sharp but not heavy enough for the work._

_Limned in sparks, the shape writhes round, awful and catlike, streaming and shedding glints scraps of itself as it turns. It pounces through my second gout of fire and chokes off the calling into a yelp._

_Panic._

_I fall back into the towerside and crumple flailing onto the ground. Fall down the slope, fighting limbs, not knowing if they’re mine. Hear screams, and don’t know if they’re mine. The darkness, the reek of smoke, the reek of bad sour candles, as tight around me now as the tunnel was below._

_I scramble onto my feet. I’ve lost my sword; lost the hound-shaped thing that jumped me. A senseless scream leaps out my mouth as I spin a circle and trace a wake of sparks and scalding air around me. Fend off. Everything that might be, could be — I won’t let it touch me. But I’m wasting my reserves; spending more than I ought to. The fear puts an excess in me. I lose my measure._

_Spinning again, body low in an animal crouch, I catch sight of my flames catching something. The same nix-shape as before, or another — no matter which, for it writhes back, air shrieking hot from its shell. I remember the wolves of the Rift, the pack’s closing circle and my widening circle of fire in the night. I wish there was more here to burn._

_But as things are, the sprays of flame bright the night into frozen pictures._

_Shurfa caves in the side of a nix-hound with her longclub. Sends it flying to crack against the facade wall. The sound of her roar outlives the image blazed into my mind._

_Balambal bursts from the tunnelmouth like a heron up from the reeds that hid it. Flashing curve of sabre takes one shadow in the shoulder._

_No peace in my mind to call light with. Only fire to shriek out at the dark. What comes at me next has a cudgel raised. No, something between pick and sickle — a farmer’s tool against my empty hands. They yell for courage. I scream for fear and fury, and half-leap backwards. A scything arc of my arms as I go – one savage move of a dance I scarcely know – and flames thrust, crest, and curl like a breaker at sea towards the coming figure. Golden edged with a foam of copper sparks and spitting as it shatters, the wave of flame has a red heart and a black manshape inside it._

_I land bad and blind though from the hap and hazard of my dodge. A sharp pain as my ankle threatens to twist. Rather than let it, I fall into its angle, tumble along the ground. Maybe I try to roll. Maybe the rubble and wreckage stops me, grabbing and bruising, objecting hard on my elbows, shoulders, sides and thighs. My scalp is sharp and bloodwet. My ankle throbs too hot._

_But the temple-ruins are painted now, in a glaze of orange light and brown shadow. At its center, a figure thrashes, ragged clothes gone all to flame. Its arms rise up and it shrieks, like a celebrant, eaten up in an oil-reeking ecstasy of fire. It goes to ground, rolling against the blunt-tooth scree and wreckage. Torch one moment and bonfire the next as it collapses. Wailing thin one moment, then sounding like spitted meat; airless, voiceless, crackling._

_The burning body gave out enough light to show how Balambal died_

_A bolt stuns him, sticking smug into the side of his ribs. It hammers the air from his lungs. The attacker whose shoulder’s grit wet round Balambal’s blade fights him to the ground as I try to struggle up. A long straight knife sinks into Balambal’s belly, hooks up; breaks into his thigh as he raises a leg, an arm, anything to fight off the other mer. Blood pools round them link an inkblot, livid-black on the stones. Their struggle sounds like the gurgling of two drowning men._

_I saw Balambal die and know how death met him, but Shurfa died in the dark that came after. I don’t know which is worse._


	28. Chapter 28

_There’s breathing when I wake and I fear that it’s my own. A labour-taken rask, groping thin air into lungs gone flat and ragged as a ship’s sails tattered by storm, battle, blaze. A helpless hopeless ruin of breath, braving the pain of keeping on for abject fear of stopping. I hold my breath til it hurts. The sound carries on, sucking parched at the air. Not my breath, I tell myself. Not my broken body._

_But even when I breathe again, and breathe again, and allow myself time to breathe deep again, my lungs ache tight, half-starved. The air is hot and fuggy, close and humid near my lips, but my limbs all ache with cold. And when I open my eyes I see only a dark, almost as whole as the red-black inside of my skull. A grid of hazy gold hangs in my vision. Firelight through sackcloth. They have hooded me like a hawk._

_I shuffle as best I can, trying blind with hands and legs and a writhing body to feel out my situation. A rope burns round my wrists. Another cord about my throat keeps the hood tight over my head. I’m on my side, a map of bruises and lacerations, too detailed by far. Wrists bound behind my back, my shoulders are an agony of gristle, gamy knots all through the muscle. A pleading warning in the joints of my arms. But my feet scuffle against dust, against grit, against boards and some thin layer of give. Rushes, rug, canvas, I think. My feet and legs are free._

_“Sturn.”_

_“What?”_

_“Said he’s sturn. Starn to stir.”_

_“Oh. Looks it.”_

_“Looks that way an all.”_

_The voices native-coarse with smoke, and dust, and storms of ash. Not the subtle grit of my mother’s voice, half-faded with time. Not the mild-grained catch and drag of the mainland. The voices have Vvardenfell in them, harsher than I’ve heard on any but the oldest Dunmer of the Quarter. One’s sexless, mid-toned, with a clumsy sibilance to it: an awkwardness between teeth and tongue. Argonian maybe. The other’s female — the one whose accent runs like oil, too flat for half the syllables to hold._

_“I’m questioning.”_

_“Yiz, is you?”_

_“Your reasons why. That’s what I’m questioning.”_

_“Got an ast, Tepa, you best ast it, aint you.”_

_“Him there. You left him live, Drosi. Why’s that? I wonder. I wonder…”_

_“Nchow. Best ast Guls than me.”_

_“He’s in no mood to talk.”_

_“Now see there you’ve catched it. Him there, he goes to kill Guls. Our Guls. And he aint do it quick. See?”_

_“He might live. Guls might yet live. A little fire? By my tail, Drosi, it takes more than a little fire to…” The sexless voice turns pleading, like someone telling a joke, begging anyone to laugh. “Drosi, he’s Dunmer!”_

_“Tccht! Stop that mouth. Stop that mouth an lissen.”_

_My breath is loud and thick inside the sack. The other breathing carries on, loud in the silence. A scab-dry sound, red raw._

_“I know that sound, Tepa, an I’ll swear you: that’s the sound of a body dine. Slow, true, but Guls is killed all a same. Him there — if he’d of killed im quick an I’d of killed him quick as well, but things been how they is? I aint like to gie him there no more mercy’n he’s shown our Guls. Circumstances’re different. See?”_

_“You could’ve said. You could’ve just said it’s about revenge.”_

_“Proportion!” The female voice barks, hacking the words into hard flints of syllable to give them sense. A sound like her surging up to her feet. “Principle! Example… Yunstand, Tepa?”_

_“Yes. Guls dies slow, he does slow. Fair.”_

_“What else we got here? Tell me that. What else kine fairness we got but what we aint done with arn own hands?”_

_I’m trapped between their voices. I’m trapped between struggle and going slack. Like a landed fish can writhe and fight the air itself that drowns it, or else can wait limp for the blow to the head, the knife — feel fear, or just the hook. I tell myself: If I could see… If they would only let me see, I’d know what to do…_

_But footsteps come, rounding me, and a hand grips the rope that ties the sack in place. Picks me up by it, like the scruff on a cat’s thin neck. I fight, but only like a hooked fish does, useless as it tries in vain to swim the air around it. I hear the rope slither, spooling over some rafter above me. They draw me up with a heave and whetstone rasp of breath. My feet scrabble to find the floor and stand my weight before the rope chokes me. Even ground and an ache in my ankle, I stand for only a moment. And I think I know what’s coming._

_“Really, Drosi? There are worse ways to go.”_

_“An kyner ways to wait the while it takes me to fine them.”_

_“Oh.”_

_“Juss hol the fuckin rope, Tepa.”_

_More footsteps over the boards, the reeds, the rug. A lighter tread. Blind, but I can smell them. A dry and dust-road smell, and something rancid, cloth gone half to rot, grease smeared over sour weeks of sweat. All that, but it’s fear that makes me gag. The brushfire boundless roaring of my mind as it speeds and smokes in vain._

_“Up?”_

_“Uh-huh.”_

_They raise me. Heave by hand by heave they jerk me peristaltic upward. My feet scrabble at the ground again, hoping to somehow cling on. All that’s left is the tips of my toes, a stricken dance against the floor. They support a sliver of me in their scrabbling. The rest of my weight ropes round my neck, impending tight. If not for the sackcloth, the ropegrain would by now be stamped on my skin. A livid red cord; memory made visible, as scars are._

_“No meat on him. Wouldn’t think he’d be so heavy.”_

_“That’d be his strugglin. Now see…”_

_A fist bulls into my gut. Again, I retch. Convulse. Feet slipping, I slump. A narrow pressure as my throat takes the weight of my fall. And already the air is gone from me, knocked by the punch, and my flat lungs strain for breath. The world’s turned half purple and stars show like bruises through the hot and heavy sackcloth._

_The rope heaves, pulling on my head til the bones all down my back begin to grind. They are hanging me, I think. This is all, I think. Another punch, this time sharp against my ribs and jarring bone to bone._

_“Blight..!”_

_“Carry on that way, Drosi, you’ll break your hand before you break him.”_

_A snarl. Drosi strikes me again. A knee. The blow cracks wet over my face and my throat convulses round the taste of blood. Then the rope goes slack and caves me down to kneel like someone at prayer. I rasp in breath as deep and heavy as the crush of my neck will let me. Breath like crying, and wrought with the tang of iron._

_“Gain.”_

_They dredge me up til I’m dancing again. They must hit me again but it’s hard to say in surety. Afraid, my fear recoils from itself and wraps me in its warmth. I remember the temple-ruin, the nix-hounds. Fire, watching Balambal, watching the knife that emptied him. In the darkness that came then, I called fire once more. But I was hollow, quenched and cold. The fire didn’t answer. It left me to them and to this._

_Pleading in the blue-black blindness, I ask it back while I still have breath. There have been stars out tonight. I’ve seen none, but they saw me; gave light out and over me, like a haze-thin fall of rain. Time has passed. A sliver skinny as a parched man’s spit, but I have back a little of my power, and a blazing will to live._

_Between my bound hands a new pain begins to bloom. It’s nothing compared with the rest. A blistering burnt-hair heat. I bear it as the ropes begin to smoke._

_But a singing whistling cry sounds through the night. The rope round my neck goes full slack and I collapse baggage-heavy and limp to the ground. I let the fire go from my mind, ecstatic again with air. So cold it aches on my teeth. So sweet it tastes like good water through the clotting mask of my bleeding nose._

_“The nix.”_

_“Spooked.”_

_The sound of fear in their voices is sweet to me as well._

_“Well?”_

_“Well what?”_

_“Got a mine to go see what’s spooked em you best go see, aint you?”_

_“Be alright with him?”_

_“Nchow…”_

_“Fine, fine… But I swear, Drosi, if I go down there and it turns out to be shamblers again…”_

_The sigh of stairs, ladder-rungs, some scaffold of wood taking weight. The sound rises and fades into the distance, off towards the crying nix._

_The rope round my wrists is cheap, ill-made and singed now. I feel it fray open against my heat-blistered hands. But the hood still has me blind._

_Drosi’s footsteps on the floorboards. My ears ring sharp for listening, trying to place her between the nightsounds, the upset of nix outside, Guls’ death-deep breathing._

_“You an me now. No help for neither one of us.” She croons, stepping closer. “Reckon I’ll have to just keep things simple.”_

_With a loose groan I try to rise. Make a show of it, hoping to coax some new kick from her. The nix are all but wailing now in whistling chorus, seething bright as steam. I keep my hands behind my back. Try to elbow halfway to upright. Some last spark of fight for her to stamp from me._

_The kick comes. A searing blue knot of pain, sudden in my gut. No warning but that I asked for it. Clenched jaw and grit teeth, I bite to pieces the grinding whimper that tries to leave my mouth. That sound’s the last of my breath, making to bolt from my belly in terror. Like a browsing buck hears the woodbreak boot of a hunter give themself away, and runs the thicket, the danger, fast as only thoughtlessness can be. But I’m less a fleeing buck, and more a wounded stag now. And I wrench free my hands, and I pounce to cling round the kick as it comes, listing hard into the pain._

_If ever you’ve feared for your life and been shown some last glimmering chance at escape you’ll know it’s a strength that comes over you, almost from outside yourself. When all’s lost and some small voice says through the towering silence about to fall, ‘no, not all’. Then it comes, willing and perhaps even able to pay any cost if only it’ll carry you on. Kill what wants to kill you, and leave you still alive, howevermuch you might be broken by the attempt. As the wounded stag, so too the army surrounded. So too your storyteller, coiled blind round a leg and crawling, clawing, groping the body attached down to his own animal level._

_We share the floor now, both writhing against the other like two flags in a gale. An elbow rains blows on my back. I trap an arm with a knee. Feel fingers scrabble at my face as I fight to get on top. Only the sackcloth saves my eyes from the scraping nails. Only the pain that covers me and soaks through all my flesh saves each new blow from registering as anything more than more of the same. I bear it._

_I’m snarling through the hood, nose bleeding again, throat hot with blood. And under me I begin to feel it: of us two, she’s the one more afraid now. Knows she opened herself to this. Knows she had too much faith that the scales were weighed in her favour, and that now that faith has failed her. She fights for breath to scream with._

_Pawing til my left hand finds jawline, collarbones, and the soft convulse of throat between them, I let one hand see for the other. I bring the heel of my right palm down crushing-hard towards it, against her throat to choke out the sound as it comes. Then like a blind man I feel up for her face, her features. Feel her muted mouth open, gnawing, trying to bite at me. Feel the rage of all her limbs as the same fear and force comes over her as has me in its hold now._

_But I don’t need strength in my limbs any longer. Only focus. And to place my hands. The blade of a hard cheek under my palm. The hollow of a temple, a hairline, beneath my fingers. One last agony bursts in on my left side. I gasp the calling and feel it froth past my lips. A blaze beneath my fingertips; hot fat against my palms. I killed her quicker than she would have done for me. Still, it doesn’t feel like mercy._

_In a surge almost of disgust, I push clumsy to my feet, off the body as it stops jerking. Shake and scrabble, my hands search around my neck, seeking out some knot. Still in the grips of my battle-blood, they make slow and awkward work of it. And then the hood tears from my head, and the night opens out all round me like some new dark dawn._

_The room is a round attic and its roof the tall-ribbed taper of a spire, cross-raftered. Slipshod, the caulking fails here and there, and scraps of night-blue sky show through the missing tiles of it. The topmost storey of some old towerhouse, I think, boarded and with dry kreshweave dustcloths for a floor. A stone-lined hearth sits cold against one grey-plastered wall. Across from it, a wide window from floor almost to ceiling, glazed from dozens of circles and diamonds: a fit of mismatched shapes, afloat in a seamwork of black lead. The glass is murky and so old that the panes have run, distorting the world beyond them. One section of glass is hinged and open but draped over with a coarse cloth curtain, worried at the corners by a cold and seldom breeze._

_Drosi lies twisted against the floorcloths. A Dunmer woman, face blistered anonymous, head scorched and smoking. The whole room reeks with burnt hair and searing fat. Poor boots on her motionless feet; just leather, loose, strapped in with strips of hide. But in a flash of jealousy, I see what else she’s wearing._

_“That’s my jacket!” My voice is a choked out rasp. I crouch down by her to tug her arms from its sleeves before she starts to stiffen. “My sister’s fucking jacket!”_

_But as I bend that same pain bursts through me again. A wet loose wrongness of feeling, lending a hiss up out from my snarling mouth. I clap a hand to the feeling and see it come away wet and paint-bright with blood. My stomach sinks as I see the little use-knife in Drosi’s limp hand. I look down before I can stop myself._

_Through both my shirts – Riftfolk, embroidered, and simple Grey Quarter kurta – a patch of blood has grown, like rust on the blade of an ill-kept sword. A tiny nick beneath my fingertips leads through the cloth and shows where the knife went in. Another hiss, almost dismay this time._

_“Fuck… Fuck…”_

_She’s stabbed me. A shallow dip against my flank, not deep but deep enough. It aches empty, like a bruise driven straight into my side. A weak-headed feeling comes over me and I blink hard, bite the inside of my cheek so as not to swoon into it._

_The night is cold, and I’m cold, and the battle-blood ebbs from out of me, like the wound itself has let it off. Emptying me out._

_“It’s nothing,” I hiss with all the plea and fervour of prayer, hoping it’ll prove true. “Ghosts and bones and all the fucking gods, it’s nothing…”_

_But I remember Tepa now, and find that I forgot them. The nix are silent outside. No way Tepa could have left, I think, except the wind-twitched curtain. I shamble over to the wide window and move the cloth. A nail and leather-lashed ladder clings to the towerside and climbs up to this room’s window. It spans down to a balcony below, narrow, skirting round the tower. In the night-black it’s hard to say how high this towerhouse climbs._

_And yet I can tell I’m in no fit state to fight or fly now. Only to hole up and hope to see morning._

_I finish stripping the jacket off Drosi’s back and the knife from her hand. Trying not to look at her face, I pat down the rags she wears beneath and yank an amulet from round her neck, and for good measure the leather and strapping from her feet and calves. Then I drag her to the window. Send the body sailing doll-like out, down, into the black. And I unlash the ladder from the window, then pull it up after me. Every movement is pain, and each flash of pain brings a newer more creeping fear._


	29. Chapter 29

The ceiling was low and beneath it the receiving room was thick with scented shade. The room’s four walls were cornered with pillars of glovewood, polished, then scored and graven to bleed out their aromas.

Simra sat on a great brocade cushion. Others like it surrounded a kind of low brushed-bronze basin, wide and shallow and well-faceted. At the room’s center it caught up the edges of every oil-lamp’s light, stole them, and showed them off half-mirrored in its many gleaming faces.

Now and then, water would slip into the basin, drop by drop from a funnel-shaped window set into the ceiling’s middle. Small shards of green true-glass surrounded by panes of plain. Through them filtered the burthen of all the recent clouds. Piece by piece, a careful controlled sample of all the rain the outside world had suffered of late. Each drop fell into the bowl with a sound like breathless singing: a murmurous hum that filled the room with something not quite music. Then the drops would slip away through needlepoint holes in the bowl’s bottom and into a large plain-glass jar beneath. Its sides were misty-cold with dew and spanned out straight and flat into a sort of knee-high table.

Wealth beyond measure could express itself in subtlety and understatement. For anything less, only excess would do. It might’ve impressed Simra once. Seemed something to aspire at, when all his life had been oats and barley, pine-smoked tea from earthware cups, striving for scraps of silver that seemed worth all the world. But now it only put a rigid disgust through him. A disappointment bitter as jealousy and almost as deep.

Say one thing of slightly rich men — say they’re complacent; that they lack imagination. Clear to see, the one whose house Simra sat in now had only thought to himself ‘I am rich now’ and, simple as that, had stopped working. His money bettered nothing, not even his own life. It only sat and showed itself, gaudy and clumsy and mute as the grave. Baelathri, Simra thought. Tomb-folk. It made a kind of sense now.

Stiff little glints of glass and nacre bothered Simra through his clothes. The brocade cushion wasn’t even comfortable. Sit up straight, it would try to swallow him. Try to lounge, it would stiffen round him; gnaw at him with its idiot teeth of semi-precious stone and wire. Stupid. The most pleasure he had here was in starkly not belonging. A hungry-boned figure in travel-clothes, muddy boots, flecks of what might be blood, and with five severed ears for a guest-gift.

“Ser..?”

An attendant in a thick winterweight gown shuffled through a doorway to Simra’s right. The gown was sashed with a belt of dust-fine netch-leather, so wide as to cover almost his whole torso. His eyes were heavily hooded and his face entrenched with lines. He moved with scarce a sound. Well-practised then; a lifetime of service; a majordomo if ever Simra saw one. Not the younger brick-heavy mer who’d admitted him into the house earlier.

Simra turned his head and raised his eyebrows, listening.

“My master, ser, would have me apologise for his delay in seeing you. He extends to you the comforts of his house, ser, and would have me ask: will you take refreshments? The road…” He eyed Simra’s cantrip-clean face and hair, his sweat- and rain-stiff clothes “…does seem to have been a long one, ser. Tea, perhaps?”

Be kind to servants, Simra tried to remind himself. Usually he’d make a point of it. But this one had served the same master too long, owed too much to that service not to love it blind as a dog loves its collar, its kennel, its owner. And Simra was in no mood to be looked down on. He dragged his eyes lazy from the attendant and up towards the ceiling-window. Against the panes of pale grey and dark green, the slow-shrinking reservoir of rainwater, night was collecting — building steady as snow.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Simra said, “but it’s gone evening. Full-dark, even. Could be that I’ve been waiting so long that time’s lost track of me. But that up there? That looks like a night sky…”

“Ser?”

Simra pursed then crooked his lips. Tilted back his head and let his body follow after, subsiding into the cushion despite the prick and awkwardness of it. A muscle complained in his back, in his leg.

“D’you have shein?” Simra said, slow, enjoying himself. “Greef?”

The attendant blinked. “This is…saltrice country, ser.”

“I understand. Understood. Entirely. Saw the paddies as I rode in. Your great heaps of rocksalt all gleaming grey in the last of the sun. Have to say, your master knows how to make the most of his land! Sujamma then.”

“…Ser.”

And the attendant shuffled out, louder than before. A small petulance sounded in every footfall. Still, he’d do as Simra asked, no matter how belligerent the bidding. And that was a good sign. He knew the old customs, Simra reckoned: the rights given to guests. They would strengthen Simra’s hand in what was to come.

Crumbs and coals of incense burnt in a brazier of polished black stone. A slow and constant sigh of smoke rose, filling the room from the corner where the incense lay burning. Scents to cloud the mind, not clarify thought; courtesan scents, not scents for the cloister. Simra would have recognised them otherwise. But the aroma starting to ache in his head had no name and grew still more nameless as he breathed it.

He remembered the brothers on the plain. Their faces by firelight at the first taste of blood as it welled from their gums. Not fear or anger as the nightshadows hollowed their cheeks and blacked their eyes, but confusion, sorrow, almost a kind of disappointment. Bandrys had tried to rise. Bigger bodied, the poison went slower through him. Even so he had stumbled, slumped into the grass, slack muscles and joints gone tough as rawhide.

It put a fear in Simra. No sense to it, no reason to suspect, but the fear crawled in all the same. The air he breathed; the sujamma he’d asked for; the kindness of strangers. His back straightened and his posture closed off where he sat. Knees touching, shoulders set high, Simra slowed his breathing as best he could. A drink. A drink would help. His thirst was impatient now and his temper short.

The attendant returned. Two servants followed, shaven-headed and clothed in combed kreshweave, the neutral hues of stagehands in festival mask-plays. People the eye might see, but the mind was meant to ignore. They set down a tray of beaten brass, a flask and two cups of smooth and perfect earthenware. The glaze on them was fine, the pinkish grey of a dove-wing, or the lids and sockets of Simra’s own eyes.

“I’m to have company then,” Simra said, angling his head at the second cup. “At last.”

“Nethyn’s indisposed. That means you get me.”

A Dunmer woman marched herself in the same way the servants had come. A high but simple piling of coarse black hair and sleek yellow pins sat on her head. Her clothes were well-cut, measure-made, giving sharp high shoulders and a stark shape to someone otherwise shapeless, average-built in everywhich way. A quilted vest made from one shade of red and stitched with another crossed and tied itself over her torso. Her trousers were high in the waist, ink-black, and so loose as to seem almost a long skirt except that they gathered at the ankles. Over this, a house-coat, bright-cream in colour and falling hard and straight and stiff as daylight in strong lines to below the hip.

She moved in a rapid shuffle, feet slippered with tapering toes in soft leather the colour of sand. Sitting next to Simra, she turned her face on him. Age seemed to have pinched and tightened her skin, rather than ridged and lined it as with most Dunmer. Her eyes were small and pink.

“It’s to your good fortune, I suppose,” she said. “My husband likes to talk. I won’t keep you nearly so long.”

“I don’t mind talking,” Simra said, sweet as he could. “Not when company’s pleasant.”

“Pity.” A hard response. She didn’t look away from Simra yet stopped addressing him. “Naftaseh, marrow in the bone of my mirth, don’t lurk so. Come in. Sit close and sit still now, you’ll never learn a thing if you insist on fidgeting as you do…”

A girl entered also. A child with long black hair, ratted and curled with tangles and loop-holes. Face all in rich inheritance of her mother’s pinched lines and sharp corners, but with two wandering moons for eyes, clay-red in pale features. She wore a long slip of indigo silk embroided in red with anthers and in white with wards against curses. The sleeves were far more than arm-long, and cuffed with stains both dark and bright as salt-marks.

“Naftaseh,” the woman said: a mother introducing her daughter as the girl sat beside her, retreating into the stiff cream folds of her coat. “First-daughter of house Minu. I am Tamsora, wife to sedura Minu Nethyn, but you’ll call me muthsera.”

She said the name like it ought to mean something worth spitting at to Simra. Ordered the names archaic, like they warranted that weight. None did. But this land was a patchwork of lesser houses and small holdings now — lone islands of adobes and House Dunmer dialect, rooted still in a shifting sea that belonged first to the wind and sky and second to the Vereansu. The Hlaalu had held it for a time, but a short time only in the life of such a land.

“Blessings on you,” said Naftaseh in rote monotone.

“And on you. I am Simr—”

“Not important,” Tamsora clucked.

Cut off, Simra started to seethe.

“Naftaseh, blood of my heart, listen. Do stop smearing the contents of your nose onto your sleeve so. Listen to me. The first thing you must learn in the running of a household is that there are certain established and proper ways of doing things, do you understand, my stars at night?”

Simra blinked hard and swallowed the urge to speak over her. Still his name, would she? Condemn it to nothing? Blight her. Instead he set his mouth straight and reached for the flask and cup. He poured a measure of clear sujamma. It clouded white as milk as it met the air.

“Some business,” Tamsora continued, “should never be rushed. The accepting of peers, the negotiation of land terms, the accepting of fealty or oaths sworn over ancestors, and all manner of things in that line. Other kinds of business –” she said the word now like it had an ill taste on her tongue “– ought to be concluded as swift as they can be.”

Simra judged the situation. He’d need to crab back this woman’s focus. With a sharp bow of his head, he turned the tray so that the filled cup faced Tamsora. “To you and to the honour of your house, from root to stem.”

Brisk and measured, she drank a small sip. No poison then, but by her face she took more pleasure from the toast than the taste. Flattery would carry him here. Flattery and efficiency.

Simra poured his own cup. In one gulp he had already half-finished it. Cassia, cardamom, and beneath the blaze of strong spirits, more of the incense but thick on his tongue now: an aroma like the ill-gotten sweetness of rot but without the urge to gag. But the burn helped smooth his voice, steady his hands and nerves. Easier that way to speak as someone other than himself.

“An honour, muthsera. Truly. To think, Simra Hishkari – that is, my humble self; or rather no one at all – and sharing fine sujamma with a Minu!” He’d never heard of her house. He fancied few had. But she’d have his name, sugar-coated as needs must, whether she asked or not. “If you’ll permit me to say so, it does me greater credit than I hoped for or deserve.”

Tamsora’s mouth pursed. It could have been displeasure or an effort to hide the start of a smile. She cut straight to business. “How many?” she said.

“Five, muthsera.”

“I expect you brought the bodies?”

“Ears, muthsera.”

“…Ears?” A moment’s uncomfortable silence. “You could have gotten ears from anyone. From anywhere. We all have two. How am I to know you aren’t passing two and a half mer off for the price of five?”

“It’s not unconventional…” Simra said, gentle as he could. She was blustering, he realised. Had no sense of how this business was done. “A landshare of this size. Imagine you must keep a shrine on your grounds? A priest?”

“Our fief includes a share of Othrenis town!” she scoffed. “House Minu is regular in its devotions at the shrine there.”

“In which case, I’ll happily wait til morning when a priest can be sent for from Othrenis. After all, there are certain proper ways of doing these things… The dead must be named, and the like.” Simra took another drink of his sujamma. Put the cup back on its tray, dry now.

“I fail to see how it’s my problem,” Tamsora said, “if you’ve failed to have your…goods properly identified. Contract or no, I shan’t pay without knowing that I’m paying the right mer for the right job.”

“A shame,” Simra said, pouring himself another cup now, settling in. “I have ground to cover. I’d hoped to be away as swift as I can be…”

“What’s stopping you?” Tamsora said, making to rise.

“Well, the law, muthsera.”

“What law?” Her voice was cold now, slow as she sank back into her seat and her daughter nestled further into her side.

“You’ve accepted me over your threshold. Offered me blessings and drink, and opened talk of business.” Simra gave a close-mouthed smile. His guest’s voice, flyblown with flattery, slipped a little and started once more to sound like his own. “Regret to say, but you can’t turn me out til that business is closed fair. I’m a guest til then. And I won’t leave til I’m paid.”

“By what means does a common bounty-chaser come to know old Council guest-law?”

“I’ve travelled widely. Listened, learnt, met all manner of people in all manner of places.” Simra’s smile widened, showing teeth. It was good to have leave to speak now, and have her be the one made to listen. “Time was I came on an ordinator in the lands round the Nabia fault, set at by fetchers, robbed and wounded. I healed her, and helped her south to Suran. She was limping and the road was long. Long enough that we came to be friends. I all but prenticed with her for a time, and in Suran she commended me to the Temple for my upright character, diligence, and quick study. They put me to work as a law-scriv and—”

“Tchaw. Spare us.” A colour had risen dark in Tamsora’s features.

“Have it as you will. Shortly said, I know old laws and new. And I know ways you mightn’t need to pay a priest’s price. Or need to keep me, bed and board, til you do so…”

“I can’t say I favour anyone so full of surprises, Simra Hishkari.”

“Can’t say I’m feeling desirous of your favour, Tamsora.” Simra kissed his teeth. He couldn’t help himself. The tall tales, the veiled threats, the shaded insults — her pride invited them all, and they came all too easy. “I only want paying, and I’ll be gone. Cleaned away with the mud off your floor. And I promise you, I’ll cut you a good rate on the naming rite too. I mean, this is very good sujamma.”


	30. Chapter 30

Rain fell in the roof-garden. Thin, pervasive, dank as a sigh against skin, it fell from a blind night sky. At the garden’s heart, the reservoir of rainwater shuddered as it filled. A handmade pond of shadowed water, the receiving room lamps ghosted up through the glass funnel of its bed.

Ten strides on each side, the reservoir’s banks made up the rest of the garden. Shores of glazing-lead, then tiles. Trees stunted into miniature and with leafless limbs, silent save for the dripping rain. A vine climbed round the doorway that led back into the house. Out of flower, its woody stems seemed more some mad-tangled trellis than anything live or growing.

On four sides tall walls closed the garden off from plain and field and horizon. Their inside faces and the floor alike were tiled in earthenware diamonds. The same dove-grey glaze as the sujamma flask. Fine local work from the poor local ground. Every sixth tile was an enamelled cameo. The icon of a watchful saint, carved in relief. Some small smug gesture of calligraphy, muttering the names of virtues: service to the house, stewardship of the land, the twin-balanced concepts of thrift and generosity. Things that take phrases to say in Tamrielic; that the Nords would ken words together to talk of, and if the poet was lucky then their kenning might catch on. In Dunmeris they have singular words to say them exact.

Simra felt the walls of the house, the roof-garden around him. A lot of work, he thought, just so the scions of House Minu don’t have to look at their holdings. See where their meals and money stems from. The paddies. The road that winds between the fields, the ditches and heapings of salt, and back to Othrenis. Mud now. A ribbon of mud and swathes of brine.

He knelt on a mat of saltrice straw, legs folded under him and back straight above. Simra’s boots sat in folded collapse nearby and his feet beneath him had only wraps to stave off the stark night’s cold. But better brave that than sit on the heels of his own muddy boots. And anycase it gave his doings a touch of the penitent or the pilgrim. Humble austerity. The coarse mat, the bared feet, the cool night closing all round him. Wouldn’t take off his boots to come under House Minu’s roof and into their hosting hands, but for the rite..?

He already had the silver plate, the racer-plume, the little makeshift pouch of packed salt. They lay on the mat, getting damp, not that it mattered. But a black iron brazier squat before him, empty and cold, pooling with a gradual gather of rain.

Simra’s hands fell into his lap with all the finality of a sigh. His mouth ruled into a hard impatient line. “Tlun-lun?” he said.

Standing nearby, the majordomo wrung his hands in reply.

“I’m not questioning your capability. You found a racer-plume on short notice, didn’t you? But I told you tlun-lun kernels too. Shouldn’t be hard to find.”

“We are not pilgrims,” Tamsora said. She sat in a hardbacked chair against a wall, sour-faced and attended by a servant with a wax-cloth parasol. “Nor are we a temple. And it seems neither are you…” In her hand she flapped a fan of parchment and scented wood despite the cold.

“Right. Pilgrims, wandering priests, ordinators-errant — they’d carry it all, just in case. Can’t not name the dead, after all, and you never know when duty’ll call. They’d also charge more…” Simra kissed his teeth. “You’ve got a kitchen.” He spoke to the servant rather than grant Tamsora the smugness of further response. “What kitchen in any well-salted house doesn’t keep tlun-lun somewhere? And with it just gone Gauntletsday – what – not three weeks past?”

The silent wring of hands. A blank and pleading face on the majordomo. The light of the garden’s floor-lamp made a mask of his features. A player in some tragedy of manners; the dutiful retainer, bound by loyalty to the intemperate lord.

“Blight, I’ll spell it out,” said Simra. “Gauntletsday. Nighttime feast of the Prince of Strife. Are you telling me the muthseras Minu fasted all day then feasted come night without the proper soup?”

“Well?” Tamsora turned to the majordomo. Her fan whirred like a hornet’s wing, flashing agitation. “See to it.”

“Muthsera.”

And the majordomo bent low, a bow so deep it hunched him, and slunk with silent tread back towards the climbing vines and the garden door. The narrow door opened. He sunk downstairs and into the manse below.

Simra spared him no sympathy. Only wished he wasn’t so likely to storm into the kitchens now and take out his wounded pride on anyone under him. Wreak Simra’s havoc on the first servant he found. People like that can bear any indignity their master heaps on them, so long as there’s someone they can pass it onto.

The wait measured itself out in hunger pangs. The glare in the back of the brain from sujamma on an empty stomach. He could take it and take worse, but he felt it all the same.

Sober, Simra’s focus was singular. The sun’s light cast on a well-shaped glass and condensed to a lance of white heat. Guljana helped; only made it more so. A focus so bright and sheer he’d forget to eat, sleep, feel proud once he realised. But drink put his thoughts beside themselves. They ran well enough, but all in parallel, all at once. Light gone again through a glass, but different-shaped so the light broke open and burst into bars of colour. Nothing he could do to stop it, short of not drinking, so Simra left them to it. He kept track of only a few.

Tamsora’s occasional attention was one of them. An intrusion, an itch sometimes at the back of his neck. Growing up in the Grey Quarter you develop a keen sense of it: eyes on your skin, are they looking or watching? Simra had never quite let it go; a childhood relic held close to his heart, and useful more often than not. But for all the noise of her gaze, Tamsora was a quiet woman now that she had only him to talk to. Her daughter was put to bed. Told no doubt to pay the strange-talking stranger no mind. He’s a nothing; a necessity; a necessary nothing, and nothing more. Let them think it, Simra thought, but leave them cause to doubt. And maybe that was what he felt in Tamsora’s look. A curiosity. And maybe that was why she didn’t speak to him, for fear of getting answers.

The ritual was the other concern. Or rather the routine of it; the resemblance. It was a lie he’d told often enough. As often as the parsimony and impatience of a client had asked for it. And as lies go, this one was wrought almost all out of truths.

From the first time he’d seen Meris go through it, he could chant the words by heart, just as she did. Just the sounds at first without the sense of them, for the dialect was old, and he’d been young, unused to it. Winter’s end, that first time, but the second time was in Spring. Meris holding a scalp by its scruff, appraising as a mercer with a sample of cloth, and speaking for the skull it was stripped from. After that he could’ve done the rite for her if not for his lack of a writ. But that writ mattered far more to the Temple itself than to lay-mer out in the world. After all, Tamsora hadn’t asked for one. Few did.

Simra had since seen Meris do it, and the magistrates of glass-mad towns do it, and on and on enough that he’d lost count but learnt the words to draw from. Might as well stop paying for it and start getting paid, he’d decided. That was four years ago, more or less. Four years of practice. He’d never made the magic work, but the rest was all there. Rite and rote, trappings and chanting, plume and plate and tlun-lun smoke. The spectacle of a spell. And in four years he’d started to reckon that he couldn’t be the only one to hollow it out, make an act of it, for appearances, for tradition. In Morrowind more so than most anywhere else, doing things the way they’re done will always shade over the why of them.

The rain carried on. Wolftoads called to each other across the unseen fields, desperate to crowd and huddle in their colonies before the true cold came down. A farewell song for the falling season; Autumn’s vestige, more wet than cold. It was all there, pedestrian as a poetry exercise. Boil it down, that’s what the rite was too.

The majordomo returned. Knelt, head down so as not to have to look at Simra though they were close together now, head to head. He wiped clean the brazier’s belly and placed two palm-sized kernels in it. Things like pine-cones but smooth and impenetrable, seeds layered up on their hulls like the scales of fish — like the laced splints of lamellar armour of which their name was a diminutive.

“Again you fail to disappoint.” Simra smiled, a glint of teeth in the high-walled gloom. “You have my thanks.”

“How long then?” said Tamsora. Her parasol-bearer shuffled behind her, like her tone was enough to unease them.

“For five? Not long. But longer than for one. Sure you wouldn’t rather wait indoors? Rain doesn’t seem likely to let up.”

“I’d sooner stay here.” But Tamsora’s voice was begrudging. More duty than desire.

“Right.”

Simra opened out the makeshift pouch. Coarse thread and cartilage inside; skin gone waxy and flesh unreal. Their blood had darkened to scabs; stained the rocksalt, turning grey to spilt-wine purple. He glanced up at Tamsora. No sign the trophies shocked her. Her disinterest was honest, insistent, laid heavy on him as sweat in the fabric of clothes.

With an open palm inches above the brazier he muttered a small Calling. Started them smoldering. In moments the kernels began to creak and cry. The scale-like seeds split off from their hulls and gave themselves to the flame. Pop and rattle, the wheezing release of trapped air, like cooking bugs on the shell. The hiss of rain as it fled from the heat, shaped like steam. The flame was too low and too lazy to give off light.

Simra held his left hand above it, a dull and stinging thing, til the flames were strong enough and knew their names well enough to thrive without his feeding them — survive the rain. Then he went for the other trappings. Held the racer-plume damp and delicate between the fingertips of his left hand. Stiff fronds out from a hardy spine, colourless but for the faded yolk-yellow of the tip and coarse as rough cloth, a racer’s plumes are unkin to the feathers on any bird. So what does a racer use its plumes for? To remind the world of what it almost is; remind itself that, for all its plucked poultry reptilery, it can still fly.

The smoke was already in his eyes, teasing their corners, wet and blinking. Its scent was heavy and carnal: red meat cooked over coals. Or was that his hunger that made it so? Anycase, alike enough that his empty belly grew teeth at the hint of it. Began now to gnaw and muzzle against the inwalls of his stomach.

With his right hand he unthreaded an ear from the string and placed it on the plate. Took it up on the open flat of his bandaged left palm and held it above the flames while their smoke filled and clothed him. Eyes closed, Simra spoke:

 _“You dead that remnant lie_  
_half awake and half in the world,_  
_curled in wait to be called,_  
_be called.”_

Simra’s voice filled up with timbre, camber. Stiff at first and then starting to flow and blaze, like tallow turns to light at the lighting of a candle. He’d watched magistrates dole out the words, the forms, all in monotony, gravity all in the flat blackness of their speech. He’d watched pilgrims turn almost the same words into near-hysterics, seizures of faith. Either way it was spectacle as much as ceremony. There were those who’d pay to see when a famed riteworker was in town. Simra had been one of them once, to watch and better know how to do it himself. A wandering priest named Doru, who’d come in the wake of a battle, like the dead themselves had summoned him. He’d drawn a crowd of dozens on dozens to the wasteland outside Selfora. It was his style that Simra stole from: a sonorous steady chanting.

 _“With a voice like the wind_  
_that dust is not made to resist_  
_I charge you: do not wake_  
_but in dreaming shape your name.”_

Simra motioned with the plume. On the kernels what had been a crowd of crawling embers blistered up into an eagerness of flame. In the dark it was iridescent beyond the ordinary pink and orange and red, coloured like a skin of oil on a body of water.

There were forms to be kept. Some words always came round. Some had been written down no doubt. They got recited like the riteworker was still reading from a page held stiff in their mind. But a belt-thin leeway of improvisation was better regarded. Vines growing as vines and beans will around the stave they climb as they grow. Simra extemporised.

 _“Nedam, like the glow_  
_of a lamp’s lit wick_  
_is pounced at by pursed lips_  
_and sudden breath,_  
_plunged sidelong into smoke,_  
_into shadow,_  
_so Nedam was stolen westward_  
_from out of their saddle_  
_on the point of a spear.”_

Names and terms — in his rite, Simra had to improvise those too. No magic here but the dancing fire. He never could make the dead speak for themselves. Instead he invented, in poetry he’d half-considered on the dirt-track here from Othrenis.

Even when the ritual was done right and true, this was the way: half trial and half funeral, the innocent would have their lives lamented. Of criminals only their death would be chanted.

 _“Nedam, the plume of law_  
_has weighed you name and flesh,_  
_found as justice found you:_  
_murderer, thief, and fugitive.”_

The home strait now. Simra was back reciting his way down a well-worn path. The flames limned down to almost nothing as the ritual drew to a close.

 _“By Azura be witnessed,_  
_by Mephala be bound,_  
_by Boethiah be found lacking,_  
_and by their power be charged._

 _May the fire consume you,_  
_time destroy you,_  
_and the Waiting Door forget_  
_it was ever asked to open at your name.”_

Simra tilted the silver plate. The grizzly trophy fell from it to sear, dry and hard as deadwood amongst the kernels and embers. There was a flash once more of that oil-coloured fire, then nothing but smoke and cinders. The tlun-lun hid the smell of scorching flesh.

He closed his eyes, a look of deep thought on his face. Solemnity and satisfaction. When they opened again, he spoke in his own voice, not the rite’s:

“Four to go. Sure you’ll stay? It’s only more of the same.”

“I’ll stay,” Tamsora said, firm.

The look on her face had something in it of an audience’s afterglow. The waning rapt attention and the almost-sorrow, as if at a loss. That was the closest he would come to a compliment from her, Simra reckoned, but if it paid extra it would do.


	31. Chapter 31

Cold weather and wet, Simra walked back out under it. His mantle was sodden, soaking through to his shoulders where the wax that proofed it against water had failed with age and use. Half his hair was painted down onto his scalp where it was short. The longer parts hung slack, dripping water down his collar. The wet made his scarf coarse against his neck.

Behind, the lights of the Minu house grew dim and distant. The sky was indigo, obscure as lacquer, a sealed vault of hidden stars. Bobbing at the height of an upraised hand, Simra’s magelight hung above his head. Troughs of shuddering water, a blank expanse of mud between the fields, it lit the dirt path back to Othrenis in the colours of cold firelight.

And toads sounded in the paddies. And the stems and straws leftover by the harvest pattered in the darkness as, slow, they went to rot. House Minu could sit and rest assured behind their walls, warm and dry. All this was good. Well-watered fields, well-fed with the mulch of this past year. But they didn’t have to work in it, walk in it, all but waist-deep in the foul-standing waters; plant the rice and salt the pools. Simra could almost agree with Noor: it’s only indoor folk, roofed folk, for whom rain’s only ever a blessing.

Or was it, at that? Water damages as much as it sustains. What it feeds it can wash away, eat, undermine. Biting flies and sickness, rot in the walls of your home. Simra wondered. Didn’t know enough about farming to know. He’d never stooped to it. Scarce ever stayed put for long enough to watch anything start to grow. The fields lay dank either side of him, abstruse as the sky overhead. And then they gave way.

Simra was richer than he’d been that morning. But still he was hungry. Turned out into the cold, the wet, to sleep beneath a roof of stretched skins and travel on come morning. Eyes on his back from the windows and balconies calling him bounty-hunter, scalp-worker, wanderer — thought of as a needful but distasteful thing, then thought of not at all.

Nothing much changes. The sameness of things leaves its marks on you. A path beaten down across his shoulders where the straps of his bags fit and had always fit and would always fit, invisible to the eye but always there. The harder shares of skin on his hands, burnt and healed so many times they wouldn’t burn any longer. But better that, he thought, than the marks change leaves.

Simra clenched his fists, gathered them under his arms and into the body of his jacket. Walked til the dim lights of Othrenis made muddy the horizon to his left and all the rest around him was blackness.

“Noor? Tammunei?”

He called across the emptiness. His voice was louder than he’d intended; slurred a little on the vowels. For a moment the haze of sujamma lit up in his head and found him ashamed.

“Tammu?”

A worry that became a fear. He turned round and around, squinting into the dark where magelight made him nightblind. The creak of his bag-straps and clatter of his swordbelt were too loud, and the wind was too loud as it picked up over the plain. A moment where he almost panicked. If they’d left him behind…

But where there’d been darkness last he’d seen, he blinked, and now there was light. A fire bloomed. Silhouettes near it and a yurt-shaped shadow.

Simra broke into a jagged run. He was halfway to camp before he realised it, and slowed his pace, and forced his breath to calm. In the last dozen strides he cursed himself for it. Idiot. Here’s what happens. People in your life, Simra – you let them in – and you bear them glad as a gallstone until it seems like they’ve up and torn a way out and only then d’you worry about the hole their leaving’s left. Idiot. Anycase, he was too hungry, too empty, too close to half-drunk to be running anywhere.

He reached the camp. First the light on his face, then firewarmth on his rain-heavy clothes. Simra halted his steps and stood in the glow.

A fire sat sullen, hissing in the rain: a wide and messy thing in a shallow pit, dug a handsbreadth into the ground.

Two guar lay huddled near it and the yurt, with their big saddlebacked bodies and long-bred legs all curled in, made as small as they might be. One slid open an eye and looked at him sideways. Reptile it might be, but there was something more cowlike in that gaze. Trust, as the eye lidded over again, and the guar murmured, and went back to sleep.

The yurt itself had grown a kind of awning. Two spars of wood and bone with hide between them stretched out from its stooped entrance like webbed fingers. Noor and Tammunei sat beneath it, dryish.

Simra looked at them over one shoulder before turning full toward them and bending to get under their cover. The rain beat drumlike above now. He was out of its reach.

“You look drowned,” said Noor. Her hands were in her lap, fingers fussing with cords and threads. She’d been braiding something.

“I feel it,” Simra said. “Drowned, starved. But I got our money.”

Noor’s face changed little at that. Like all he’d said was that it was raining. “Get dry. I won’t have you sick.”

“I’ve had the damp-lung. It doesn’t come twice.”

“A chill, though. A caul on the throat. That’ll come as many times as it pleases, leaving the door open for winter fever. And what then?” A pause as she lent him a serious look. “Get dry.”

Simra lowered his head. Not a nod, but still an admission. She was right. She sounded so much like his mother it put a weight in his throat, his chest. He set to warming himself. Took a long cold breath, and with it borrowed from the warmth of the fire, taking it inside him. From the inside outward, his clothes began to steam and his skin to sweat.

“There’s meat,” Tammunei said, quiet.

“Hm?” Simra’s eyes came open and found the younger wise-one, picking at the frayed hem of their smock-skirts, teasing loose a thread.

“You’re hungry? There’s meat for you. A little.”

“I’d kill for bread, rice, yams…”

“Go back into Othrenis come morning,” said Noor. “Buy your bread with the money you made and you will have done just that.”

Simra snorted, humourless. “If I had a grain of rice for all the times I’d heard that one…” If, if, if — he’d still be hungry, but better fed than he was now.

“Saddle-meat,” said Tammunei, passing Simra a dark strip of jerky.

“From them?”

“Yes.”

They all knew who ‘them’ meant: the dead mer, left two days back on the plain. Whose rations they’d eaten since, and whose guar they’d stolen and ridden; whose ears they’d traded for coin.

“It’s not good,” said Tammunei. “Eat in the dark and you’d think you were eating their boots, not their food.”

“But it’s what we have,” said Simra. Biting and wrenching away a mouthful of the tough meat, he longed for spices, vegetables, sauces… “Saw skewers, riceballs, fried dumplings in Othrenis today. Ghosts and bones but I could go for one of those. All of those.”

“Why didn’t you?” Tammunei said. “Then, I mean?”

Simra chewed, waited impatient til he’d swallowed to speak. “Knew where I was going by then. Didn’t want to waste time. Things were ideal I’d’ve gotten to and from the Minu estate before darkfall, but things scarce ever are, are they?” That was half a lie. In truth, with money on his mind, he’d forgotten.

“You’ll go tomorrow?” said Tammunei.

“I’ll see what I can get, yeah.”

He was richer than he’d been that morning, but it was money he could scarce afford to spend. Not with passage to buy, supplies to pay for later down the line.

“Twelve drams, thirty-three shils,” Simra murmured, though they’d not asked. Twelve glass coins strung round his neck and the rest clattering, a load of copper and iron and tin, in his purse.

“More than you thought,” Noor observed.

“A little. I turned a few tricks for the extra.”

“You don’t sound happy,” said Tammunei.

Time was he might’ve answered true. I’m not, he’d have said; I’m worried, laced tight with all this. But that was when Simra and Tammunei had been alone. Before Noor.

“It’s fine,” he said instead. “It’s enough.” And the word was bitter with a childhood taste: a diet of roots and groats and millet, and his mother saying it’d suffice.

The sameness of things struck him. Sameness and change. Time was he’d have turned in the bounties and spent two days feeling rich. Drunk, walled in and warm, eating, writing. Aimlessness is cheap, he thought; it’s having goals that costs you dear.


	32. Chapter 32

_It was only this year, I think. This year and yet a world ago. I was a boy then. A mercenary contracted to the company of the Red Vahn, in the pay of Jarl Ulfric Stormcloak._

_There had been a battle. I had no hand in it. Held neither shield nor spear but went among the bodies with the throat-slitters, the scavengers, beside my quartermaster to take what we could from the wreckage. Pulling gold teeth from out the jaws of death; cutting arrowheads from the fallen._

_It was the first I’d seen. Death I’d seen before. I’d killed — not clean, not often, yet all the same and even so. But a battle’s something else entire. Like a thing that shouldn’t be: a great ripeness of carnage, corpses. Springtime in the Rift and the reek and the flies and the hunger of wasps made the whole spectacle more than could fit in my head. Waste, as far as the eye could see. Ground boggy underfoot despite weeks without rain. And then there were the wounded. And they were almost worse._

_No hand in the killing, and perhaps that thickened my guilt. Fight in the throng and you protect those around you. Your violence is also an aegis for the fighters ahead and behind, to left and to right. I’d saved no-one that way. I begged our company’s healer, at least let me help with the wounded. He was an Altmer, tall, lines round his eyes like the cracks in pottery too small and tight to let even water seep through. Clovis, an Altmer with a West Nordic name. Healer to our company, barber and surgeon, plier and puller of real teeth when they rotted._

_He’d let me help him before. My mother had taught me plants good for poultices: ravelbyne, willowbark, the white from the eggs of the Skyrim rock-warbler. I’d been useful to him then. Keen eye and listening ear, I’d learnt from him. I helped him cut cloth for dressings and he cut my hair. (And I still wear the outgrown aftermath of that cut now, mussed from the sack thrown over my head, slicked to my brow with sweat.) But when the wounded came in from that battle on the plain, I begged him._

_“Let me help you again.”_

_“You don’t know how.”_

_“So teach me.”_

_In the back of a wagon he taught me words. A mantra in Altmeris so old no-one speaks it, save when they don’t want to be understood. Words to distance myself from pain and quicken the mending of my own body._

_“What use will that be when more wounded come in?”_

_“If you’re among them? Plenty.”_

_“And if I don’t plan to be?”_

_“A healer heals what he knows. As far as bodies go, I assume you know your own best. If not, you’ve – ah – had a youth more interesting than mine. But the fact remains: to learn healing, start with yourself.”_

_“But where does the magic come in? It’s just words.”_

_“There’s nothing for magic to work on, is there? Are you hurt, Simra?”_

_And now I collapse, and I think: Yes, I’m hurt, yes. I collapse on the floor of the towerhouse and the buckle of my knees, the pain in my hands as I catch myself, tell me I ought never have got up. My vision is dark. A feeling like strong drink starts in my skull. And I roll onto my back, then onto my side. The flank where I’m wounded is upright. My shirts stick to the skin and beneath it my torso feels caved in, bruised, beginning to throb._

_The mantra Clovis taught me. The Rift. It was only this year, and I was only a boy, and I’ve not yet stopped being that. I’m not yet nineteen. That’s a truth I’ve tried of late to put from my mind, but bleeding and starting to whimper I feel every part a child again. Lost and afraid and not knowing how to save myself. It’s that childish feeling that starts me crying. A wrenching hopelessness, as I realise my only hope is myself. No-one is coming to help._

_The mantra can be begun at any point along its length. It’s a circle. Only touch to a point in its circumference and trace around. I grope and grovel towards the place it has in my mind now. I touch, and begin to trace, begin to talk it through. Unfamiliar sounds in a language I don’t know. But they chant the rhythms of the body, the cycles of waste and renewal. And their rhythms force my breath to slow where it had grown tight with panic. That’s the mantra’s first mercy._

_Still there’s dark seeping into my eyes. A threat on the edges of my mind, made of memories that beckon, beg me to drown as I dream them. Anything but live in the now, where the pain pounds like a drumbeat, overshouting the stamp of my heart._

_Awake. I need to stay. I need to stay awake. The sleep that wants me will swallow me whole._

 

Simra’s pen hovered. His hand paused til the nib went dry.

Chronicle, account, book-to-be — whatever it was, it was growing messy. Like a once-groomed garden left unchecked. It had started out as neat squares of prose on the folds of parchment he’d bought in Bodram. Now it was a roll of papers, extraneities, scraps scribbled here and there and tied all together with a strip of someone’s torn shirtcloth. Good parchment at its heart and oddments furling round and outwards. Only Simra could order them now, and that bothered him…

The leaf he was working on rested on the back of his satchel. Stiff leather, stiff paper or parchment laid over it. It had served him fine as a writing desk for years when nothing finer could be found.

The little Telvanni-made notebook sat next to him, beside his inkstone in its carved bone box. It was open to his calculations, scribbled down from memory after that morning in Othrenis. Just to check he’d not cheated himself, or let himself be cheated. Just to keep track rather than count out all his coin again. Just so that if someone in Senie asked – a merchant, a traveller – at what price rice for retail down the southwestern road, he’d be able to tell them. Information’s a saleable luxury too, and lighter by far than coin.

He’d bartered away what he couldn’t use. The helmet with its bonemould peak and mail coif; the shell earring and painted luckstone. He’d walked into town with five pairs of boots slung across the saddle of the guar that he led for a pack-beast.

Some of it went in trade. A toothless pantryman in the fuggy warmth and shade of his shop, amongst the shelves of jars and baskets of potsherds. He’d smiled too often as Simra traded him the earring, the luckstone, for their worth in wares. A refilled flask of the local sujamma; worse by far than Tamsora Minu had served him, but not too bad to drink if you weren’t too proud to drink it. A leaf-wrapped parcel of black-flecked white scuttle. A small jar of preshta-jan to season days of nothing but rice, and a paper-bagged handful of black dried hunter’s mushrooms.

The helmet went to a smith. But she was the tools-and-nails backcountry kind, and Othrenis is a small town, and Simra knew better than to ask for all its worth in coin.

“You have rice? Millet?”

“My winter stores.”

“Any you can sell?”

She put up two pounds from her pantry, brown hulled grains, black now and then with wild rice, errant from off the plains. A skillet too, of dark-hammered iron, and two-dozen fowling arrows: a gift to keep Noor in temper about a morning wasted on trade.

“D’you sharp blades too?”

“Two shil a knife. Three for a longer blade.”

“A yera and four then.” Simra unsheathed his four knives, his heavy-bladed sword, laying them down. At once he felt half-helpless without them. Even with a looted hatchet through his belt and magic at his fingertips. “Be back for them and the remaining – what? – call it two yera and four?”

“Two.”

“Just two?”

“Just two. Buying it’s no sure thing. Who’d I sell helmets to herebouts?”

“Only people like me.”

“Only people like you,” she nodded.

Simra didn’t argue. Only carried on through Othrenis to its narrow corner of a marketplace.

No rain today but the ground was still churned to mud from the traffic of traipsing feet. A streetfood seller roasted groundnuts and grilled skewers over rocks he kept hot with flames from his fingers. Cone-hatted farmers wrapped up against the cold in all the clothes they owned grouped together round cauldrons of trama-root and brown rice tea to sell their surplus.

Scant harvest this year, Simra reckoned over their baskets, their urns, their bundles. They had little to sell and prices were dear. Winter rewards the miser, he thought. But he bought three more pounds of saltrice, five starchy white winter dirtyams like hairy crooked fingers, and a bunch of long onions with skins like paper. Paid in coin. Would have felt almost charitable if not for his own slimming funds. Winter rewards the miser but the hearts of the hungry belong to the generous; the maxim finished itself, bitter in his thoughts. Where had he read that? Heard that? It wasn’t Temple creed, that was certain. Eight or Nine? It would come to him, but wouldn’t come now…

Returning to the smithy, Simra bought a skewer of three plump grilled dumplings. Wasn’t that what he’d wanted, after all? They were hot, comforting, filled with fermented rice-bran paste and shards of crushed numb-pepper. He forced himself to eat them slow, staving off guilt with each chaste small half-mouthful.

When Simra left had left Othrenis that morning, he left with a feedbag of rice and yams and onions slung over the guar’s neck. A string of dead men’s boots still hung there with it. Not even the farmers would buy them.

Four shils worse off. That’s where the page said he stood now, in blot and bleeding ink. No matter the pay he’d had from House Minu; he’d lose that soon enough as well. He had the arrows, the sharpened steel. The skillet where a simmer of scuttle and yams and preshta-jan was steaming down now, starting to smell good as it fried. But the page of calculations still briared at him.

He closed it. Stowed it in his bookbag where it wouldn’t look at him and he needn’t look back.

“Who taught you?”

Tammunei asked it from across their camp before Simra could go back to writing. They half-rose to hunker a stride or two closer, around the small fire, the seething skillet and its contents. Red oil, sliced black scuttle, chunks of yam gone the colour of rust as they softened and sizzled.

“Taught me what?” Simra asked, leaning over the satchel and parchment in his lap to put the words into his torso’s shadow.

Tammunei’s eye went to the skillet, the steam.

“My ammu, mostly.”

“No,” Tammunei frowned. “You weren’t very good before. You haven’t seen her since.”

Something tightened in Simra’s throat and he told himself it was only the insult. “You mean when I met you? I thought I was alright…”

“You’re better now,” Tammunei offered. “So I wondered who taught you, between here and then?”

“Morrowind,” Simra lied, short-tongued, a little sharp. “Didn’t know the ingredients when I came here. That’s all. Scuttle, scrib — where’d I learn to cook that in Skyrim, hm?”

Now they’ve got you remembering, Simra thought. Tammu and Ebonheart and all that came after. Every word he wrote now drew him closer to writing that out.

“I’m sorry,” said Tammunei. “I’m interrupting.”

“No. No, I’m done writing.” Simra began to fold his parchments, his papers, clean his pen while his inkstone went dry. “Food’ll be ready soon. Best get to it.”

“Noor’ll be back soon. I should look useful. Or thoughtful at least.”

“And so the witch sweeps in from off the plains to scowl at my cooking…”

“Shul! It smells good! She’s grateful. Only she shows it badly.”

“I got her arrows. Hunting ones. Another reason for her to pretend she doesn’t know the words for ‘thank you’.”

“She’ll like those.”

“And I’d like if she caught us some racer with them. Deer, goat, nix. Thinks any of that’s likely?”

“Not deer. Not for five days now.”

“Not even gonna ask how you know that.”

“Less goat too with every eastward step.”

“Hm. I’m sure we’ll manage.”


	33. Chapter 33

_I lived through the night to fear death in the day. Did I sleep? If I had I wouldn’t be awake. But time has mixed itself and the colours have run. Have you ever tried to unstir paint, back from brown to its brighter elements? Green, blue, red, white. Useless, bootless; better you piss up a wall and try to stay dry. But I try now to remember._

_I crawled to my bags and wrenched open the neck of my gathersack. I remember my fumbling fingers as I fought to keep them steady. Uncover the crock of ointment from my mother’s stores and off the string and parchment lid. Hem of my shirts held up in my teeth to show the wound in my side. Not deep, I told myself; not deep._

_I dredged it with water, trying best I could to clean the wound and see it better. Not deep, but still a hole in me, and I felt something pull me outside of myself at the sight of it. A faintness of feeling. Brief diamond of blinking red, one knuckle wide where the blade went in, set in wax-pale flesh just beneath my ribs._

_Gagged on cloth, I hissed in silence, sounding the wound. An astringent ointment, dark as pitch and smelling of vinegar and nettles. I coated my fingers with it and pressed it inside. Something to keep infection out; hope that it will knit me closed again. (I must have used it all for the crock sits on the floor now, scoured empty. But if not on this then on what?)_

_All the night I spent in thick-voiced muttering, the mantra round and round, through and out of me, through and out and back inside like breath. A constant prickle of magicka as my flesh spoke to itself in a tongue I don’t understand._

_Now morning finds me through the wide window’s glass and lead. A heap. Back bent over belly; belly hunched over knees. Crossed legs and elbows crowded in; I tried to keep myself from comfort for the sake of staying awake. So the grey light sees me as I saw the few true-dead bodies we found celled up in the tomb-turned homes of Old Ebonheart. A curled thing. A shape trying to swallow itself. Hanging sorry hair gone stiff with fear-sweats. My shirts are worse but I don’t dare look down and see what’s clotted blood and what’s my own dried lather._

_“You reek…” I find the breath to mutter. Though for all I know a bath might kill me. Hot water, loosing the plug of ointment and blood in my side to let all I am leak out. Can that happen?_

_The jacket cuts a trim figure on the ordinary. Now I’m so reduced it hangs from me. Hangs on my shoulders, comforting, like an embrace I don’t deserve. It belonged to Soraya – my sister – before it was mine. I feel it still does. Years that feeling will linger; even now I’m yet to shake it. Seeing me now she would’ve praised me and mocked me for this, both in the same breath._

_“You’re not murdered, Sim. Not for lack of trying but you fucked that right up. Oughtta be laughing. Oughtta be proud.” And she’d pause there and cuff my ears, which she always said were the one sign I had any ashlander in me: wide-angled, batlike; wasted on both of us, she said, considering what we are and aren’t. Or with her eyes she’d make like she was cuffing my ears at least. Find my shadow; make to slap it so I’d flinch, like a pin stuck through a mommet. “So why the tears?” Like an accusation._

_But for all but all my years a child, I’d cry and she’d come running. Save me, scold me, hold me after. Do it enough and maybe she thought something would form on the surface of my suffering, sorrow, fear — whatever made me cry. Like a callus, hardening me. And maybe she was right._

_I’m not crying now but the memory’s still salt-heavy on my cheeks, salt-stinging on my eyelids and eye-angles. Either way Soraya would know. Just as she’d know what to do. Alone I have no other choice but to do what I think is best. Fear made a child of you, Simra, but you’re only half that. Act the older half._

_I start the mantra again. The pain is bad but less so while I’m chanting. I rock on my sit-bones, back and forth, to the spell’s rhythms and wide-throated vowels._

_I should stitch it, I think. I have needles; three needles of bone, but only coarse darning thread, thick as veins. It’d do more harm than good._

_I should rest, I think, but I can’t stay here. The other one, Tepa, is still out there. They’ll find Drosi as I threw her down, and then it’ll take more than a pulled up ladder to keep them from me._

_Forced to choose between two fears I choose what scares me most. Leave, wounded; lose Tepa. A bird on the wing is harder to hunt than a bird caught in its nest._

_My mantra hitches into a groan as I rise to my feet. Knees and hands, then boots on the boards. The pain crowds in as the spell lets up: its power’s in repetition, like a plaster-painter layers and layers to cover a wall in colour. It all but bends me double, yet I straighten up again._

_I look to the room, to my bags, to the ladder flat on the floor by the curtained window. And there I see I’ve not been alone. Guls is there — or what was Guls. The mer I killed, laid out by the hearth._

_His body has on a kind of coat, knee-length, bell-sleeved, patterned in an overlap of squares and triangles in red, black, white, and woven more like a thin carpet than clothing. But I woke without my aketon. Tepa must have taken it, I think, before Drosi tried her best with me. My sword, too, is gone, but the morning is cold and the days will grow colder, and the nights will freeze me if I go without. My aketon’s loss worries me more now. My Firecalling scorched Guls’ coat only a little on one side._

_“It’ll do,” I say._

 

One guar carried two riders. The other, just Noor, and the bulk of their gear. An ambling progress, pilgrim-slow, across the north-eastern Deshaan.

Simra rode behind Tammunei, spine against spine. Tammunei watched the road unscrolling ahead, and Simra looked backward as the track narrowed to nothing in their wake. Only stirrups for the rider, so Simra gripped with knees and ankles as best he could to the back of their guar. Swayed as best he could with the sway of it.

A frozen rain fell. Not quite snow but trying its worst. Simra turned up his scarf over his head to shawl his ears, his hair, and hood his face. That morning he’d watched as the road went from soft dirt and puddles to a ribbon of black slurry. On either side the plains were dun, grass heavy with wet, air leaden with cold.

The wound beneath his ribs had hurt ever since Old Ebonheart. That and all the others besides, each in their own way, but it was the ones that quarrelled with muscle that hurt worst in the chill. The arrow he took near the neck in the Rift. The straight deep scar up the backstairs of his ribcage; seldom seen with his own eyes, but it knit so tight sometimes Simra’s whole right shoulder would angle forwards, stoop low, stuck inflexible like it was cowering from the memory of the wound.

Simra remembered Nords in raiding season, back in Skyrim. No shieldmeets in Windhelm’s walls; when cities fight they call it war. But the Nords found other ways to strut, show themselves skaldworthy, without drawing steel. Scar-showings in the Summer sun. Warriors stripped to the loins on commons and in the streets outside meadhalls. Gave themselves off to the eyes of others: pale but pinkening as the season drew on, and chased with the red and silver of old wounds. They’d read their scars like maps through their days, through their deeds.

You’d do well for yourself now at a scar-showing, Simra thought. That’s if they’d have you, greyling and all. That’s if you’d have them, eyes on your flesh, and you know sure as snow that you wouldn’t. Your skin’s been set crawling by less.

He gripped his wrist in his left hand. Flexed the fingers of his right. In this weather they stiffened solid if he didn’t keep them moving. An hour might pass in the mornings before they could hold a pen, grip a sword. The scars would seize. Half-dead digits under his bandages, complaining all the way back from the brink as he cursed them, rubbed them half to life till they would move at first a little, then almost as normal. Almost.

You’d do well for yourself now at a scar-showing, Simra thought again. That’s if not for the scar on your back and how they’d call you a craven. Leave it to the Redoran to look at your hand and call you worse besides…

The plains broke up as the day drew on. No longer flats, high grass and sky, but rising shapes either side of the road. First in the distance. A tumulus sometimes, or some long-flanked crest whose blind side Simra found hard to trust. Then the stammering starts of hillocks; the beginnings of low rocky crags.

“Trees,” Tammunei said, as the sun set to their backs.

Tangles of heather and trama shrubs hedged the slopes. A splash of colour as a combush straggled bitter between rocks, roots coveting and parting the stones, the stony soil. A few bare-armed birches struck skyward, thin and straight as spears and with skin like paper.

“By my maps we ought to see mountains tomorrow,” said Simra. “Ghosts and bones, I hope that’s all we see. There’s a lot you can hide in hilly land.”

They stopped and camped in the falling half-snow. A notch in the land just a ways off the road. Low jawbones of risen ground either side of them, and the day beginning to darken.

 

_Like a stag goes chased through the woods and maps its path in blood. No crown but velvet for him, slick as something newborn, already gore-glistening like a wound. No tangle of barbs, spears, blades to crown him, he goes unarmed and hunted. Blooded already by the hunters’ first arrow, he’s lost them, but never for long. They are in the wood, and he’s in the wood, and they share it together with the sound of hounds._

_So too with me. Compassed round by Old Ebonheart’s citadel district, and by walls that’ve already failed to keep out the Winter. Wounded, and healing, but it limits me more than I’d like. To my name I have only one fingerlength knife, a spearhead without a shaft, a wand that can only save me so many times…_

_I go down from the towerhouse while the dawn is still grey. Trust to mist and to shadow to hide me. Still I see Tepa, and nix-hounds, and a throat-closing fear in every change of light and far-off sound. And Old Ebonheart is full of sounds. Only, I didn’t notice before I was alone. Before I was awake and aware and with my hearing honed brittle-sharp by worry._

_Masonry murmurs, crumbles; wind gnawing at stone. Sometimes you can hear the sea, whispering one day, in foam and roaring storm the next. Birds sing among the empty buildings and racers shriek from the roofs. And in the damp of night and the mist of morning, I think I hear ironwork rusting, bronze turning gold to green. A bell or a chime, disturbed by the breeze. Things going slow to dust._

_But there are also the movements of beasts, the voices of people. They hid from us when we were many – a procession going through the city’s causeways – but because I’m hiding from them, they don’t know to hide from me. And I wonder: Who are you? Tepas and Drosis and Gulses, all of you? Or are there families here? Are some of you like me?_

_In stumbling process I try my way through the city. Noon I look back where I came from and think I see a tall fire, or a tall something topped with fire, and then I look back no more. I chase towards where Tammunei and the rest would have waited: to the start of the landbridge that spans the way across Scathing Bay and to Vvardenfell. Or I try to, but my bearings are gone. I hurt myself with the pace I strike, and all the same I fail._

_I collapse where I stop. The overhung doorway of some warehouse on Ebonheart’s northern seaward side. My wound’s closed. I feel at it, snaking a shy hand under my shirts, and letting in a whisper of cold to play against my skin. Hard to say what of the scab that covers it is me and what the ointment I fed it. Closed, but I remember I had a comrade in the Rift who took a similar wound. It closed, was half-healed, but now I recall its sudden grin, and his fear that this was it: a candle burning down inside him. I gave him the same ointment but never had time to see how well it helped. The wound was not what killed him._

_The sea is black before me now. The splinted finger of a lighthouse stands up against a pink ruin of sky. Evening falls, then darkness, and I can’t make myself stand._

_No point, I think. Not for all your wishing. They’ll have gone a day back, just like you arranged. They’ll have left you, given you up for lost, and the biggest pity to them will be not that you didn’t return, but that you didn’t return with food. A moment’s mourning and then moved on._

_What can I do but do the same? So, like a chased stag, I try to narrow my mind. Block and blot out what won’t bring me survival. Shelter and sustenance, as the night cools, and frost descends, and Winter bares its teeth._

_But it’s hard not to think of Tammunei, and wonder, was it hard to turn their back and carry on across the landbridge? Who’s to say what’s the heavier truth: that I left them, or that they left me._


	34. Chapter 34

_I wake late. What is there to wake me? No light to reach me here where I shelter and sleep. I’m walled in, half-buried, and that too feels like home. Like my hammock in my parents’ warren, off the creak and chime of the Grey Quarter Rigs. But here there’s no city-sounds to wake me either. It’s hunger that does it, thirst, a full bladder…_

_My eyes come open. Here again. Darkness, three-days-familiar. The scent of old colours, seed-oils, solving-spirits. I shake off the tangle of my bedding and the air outside them is cold. Rub my hands together to warm them but into my joints a brittle chill has found its way. I call a magelight to move by._

_Dust beginning to dance as it rises from the mess of bags and sacks, curtains, coat, and rags where I’ve heaped myself to sleep. Here again. The faded colours of what was once a ceiling painted such a lurid blue that the sky creeps into my dreams these days, and I fall then fly then fall, then wake. Here. It was a shop once, I think. The frontroom of some low trader off an alleyway: a dealer in paints and pigments, dyes and mediums._

_I make my bed behind the counter, facing the doorway. Shutters on the outside, slatted in chip-lacquered wood. On the inside, my side, a grate of painted metal on a swinging frame. It doesn’t lock – someone has made away with the mechanism – but I swing it to as I sleep even so: its hinges scream with rust as it moves. On the counter itself are mortars, crucibles, scales and pyramidal brass weights. Old stains of magenta, cyan, turmeric yellow stain the grout between the marless grey tiles on its worktop._

_The ruins round here are all this way. Vats stained crimson, yellow, black in rooms hung heavy with the scent of crushed minerals. Warehouses, workshops, retailers; hoarders, makers, and sellers of colour. Dyer’s End, says the one legible sign I’ve seen. Spelt out in chips of blue ceramic on a ground of tan tile-shards; a mosaic pressed into each face of a squat skinny obelisk still standing at an intersection between alleys. Characters down its face. Dyer’s End._

_Back to the wall, I rise. Hang with my hands to the countertop and heave onto my feet. I slept full-clothed. No sense even in offing my boots. The whole world now is filthy._

_My belly cramps with hunger. Blurred shapes like the scales of fish swim silver in front of my eyes. I blink til they leave off but the sharp acid feeling in my stomach remains. The sense that my body is eating itself with every passing day. The least I can give it’s water and the fluid illusion of fullness that it brings. I know where to find that. Ought to count myself lucky but can’t._

_I sling my bags. Carry all I own with me, always, and sleep with my luggage around me. This huer’s shop isn’t home, only shelter. What if I find somewhere better? Richer pickings; warmer, safer walls? So I go, a shambling shape of strapping and cloth, a dead mer’s singed and carpetlike coat._

_The grate screams as I open it. The shutters spread out onto dim Winter sunlight and the narrow street beyond is hoary with last night’s frost. Weeds dried up from the cold crowd between the cobbles. Every year I suppose they grow and die here, grow and die._

_Above the shopfront of my shelter is an awning of stretched leather. It sags down with a liquid weight: dew and melted rime. I ready my waterskin and reach up right-handed to tug at one corner til it becomes a kind of spout. The wound in my side is stiff and tight as I raise my other hand as far as I dare, mouth of the waterskin to the trickle of falling water._

 

“We don’t talk a lot now.”

Even statements, even-toned, Tammunei could turn into questions. Lines of questioning, not perhaps promising they’d ever say more about it, but starting you off yourself: asks chasing answers round the dark of your head. Simra knew that well enough from when they used to talk.

“Hmmh.” His close-mouthed murmur left his nostrils as mist.

A damp chill morning, and he squat by the ashes of last night’s fire. New place, fire built the same way, and ending in the same cold cinders. Trees dripped dew from bare branches, growing up sparse on the edges of the camp.

Neither forest nor copse, this. Only a wide-ranging statuary of lone trees, fighting what Simra could only reckon was piss-poor soil, fighting each other for rain and sun and whatever else a tree’s roots asked from the ground beneath it. Standing and stillness aboveground, but below those roots searched desperate, pale and hungry. Maybe they didn’t know each other; didn’t see the war they were all fighting over the same thing, but they fought it all the same. Everything gained, taken from someone. Everything won is lost. Simra thought of Old Ebonheart. Had thought of little else these past days.

“Sometimes silence can be something shared,” Tammunei said, asking Simra’s eyes and attention back to them. A shape sitting in the failing grass of these shallow hills. Clothed in the colours of the sea, patterned in the shifting shapes and colours of water. That was the coat Simra had cut from a dead Vereansu for them, the tassels of its hem gone daggy already with dry grass, damp, sitting straight down on any old ground. “Sometimes it’s something worked on by people. Like a blanket whose warmth you both wear. It becomes part of your comfort.”

“And what you’re saying’s this isn’t that? Make you uncomfortable, do I?”

Simra’s eyes flicked up quick as flinching to check Tammunei’s face. See the damage. He’d spoken sharper than he’d meant to. It was hard of late to have much patience with people and less still was left for himself. He caught a shifting something cross Tammunei’s face. Confusion in the way their brow, the corners of their eyes, of a sudden showed their age. Whatever that age was. Another time Simra might have asked. It’d do for a change of topic.

“No?” Tammunei said, slow. “I mean, I don’t mind you. But you’re so filled with words usually. Questions. Why is it? Is something wrong?”

“You know what it is.”

“No.” Tammunei shook their head. A shudder of wet red hair. “If something’s wrong I’d like to help. Can I?”

“You know what it is. Starts with ‘En’ and ends in ‘Or’.”

Tammunei’s frown opened into something so patient as to be frustrating. Their old and listening quiet. Noor was away, tending to whatever deeds and duties carried her away from camp whenever they stopped. Put enough ritual round all that you do, Simra thought, and no-one’ll suspect, when you slip away, that it’s only to piss. Deeds and duties and prayers to the dead; she’s made that what she’s made of.

“I feel…chaperoned.” Simra rose to his full height. His knees griped a moment and then did as told. Turning half away from Tammunei, he began to work the fingers of his right hand, putting feeling back into them, and flex. “Dunno why. Fuck… Maybe cos she’s kin to you. Just…can’t make myself say what I mean. Like everything needs to be something I’m fine having overheard.”

In a way it was the truth. Or a truth at any rate. Only thing that belied what Simra said was that it buried the obvious answer. That it was hard to say on what morning, or else in the depths of what night, but the Grey had found him again. A sickness in all its symptoms, like the winter fever or throat-caul Noor had warned him of, but in how it came – and always came back – it still felt so much more like a curse. Years went by, friends and family came and went, and lovers even, and it was amazing the sheer number of things he found easier to say than this: that sometimes he got sad, and stayed sad for a time. Stupid to even think of it now. Everyone does, don’t they? It’s only your weakness, Simra. If that’s your curse, you bear it.

“I understand,” Tammunei said after a pause. An impish curl at the corners of their mouth. “Me too. But d’you know, I don’t know why? When I was small—”

“In the Morayat?”

“—Yes, when I was small in the Morayat, and before too. Back then, she was always the least…something. Rigid. I could say more around her than any of my mothers. She was my sister. She let me ask things, stupid things, because she knew that’s how you really get wise.”

“But?”

“I was afraid of my mothers’ disapproval, disappointment. But with Noor I was scared of…Noor, I think. I don’t know. She gave me less cause. She never raised a hand to me. But in everything but how she was to me, I knew she… I mean, she hated things. The life we lived. The state we’d come into. Blacklight and the Redoran. Skyrim and the Nords. Everything that wasn’t us…”

“Amazed she tolerates me at all.”

Tammunei shrugged. “She owes you.”

“Reckon she hates that too. It does that. Debt.”

“I don’t know.”

“Hm…” Simra glanced to his bags. To the track they’d beat the night before, from the road to where they’d camped. “Tammunei?”

“Yes?”

“This was talking, right?”

“For me. More than I’m used to. But you said almost nothing. If you’re still full of words but not saying any of them, is that why you’re writing so much? To get them out?”

“You make it sound like…something. Lancing an ulcer. Draining a boil.” A clipped rustle of laughter, sounding short then gone.

“Is it not like that? You never seem to enjoy it.”

“Hm. Maybe. But doing it’s better than not.”

Writing so much, they’d said. Strange to have it put that way when it felt so far from true. He was writing, but badly, til it felt like no writing at all. No relief in it. Only stumbling and stumbling, and hoping you were stumbling forward, not just wasting ink and paper.

A poet is a paradox, some poet once said. What poet, Simra couldn’t recall. But a poet is a paradox. Wise in the ways of language, of words, the poet knows enough to know that words are never enough. The only thing the poet knows more about than words is the failure of words. The aphorism, when Simra read it, had made it sound like a good thing…

 

_I was a good climber once. Blight it, a week ago I was a good climber. But here and now I’m hindered. The pain’s gone down to a murmur. Good. Only goes back to hurting as bad as it did sometimes. Only when the nights turn vicious-cold, or when I move my left arm just so. But I keep thinking of my side tearing open, starting up again. The reach and pull of climbing — if anything’d stretch the scab to breaking, it’s that._

_Old Ebonheart’s a city made for climbers now. There are streets you can’t leave except upwards, crawling skywards. There are places you can’t go except by chancing yourself down. And that’s familiar to me. Before I ever knew open country, roads or fields, hills or plains, I knew this. The landscape of my childhood, and most of my life thereafter._

_In the Grey Quarter things are simple and narrow if you’re grounded. Two choices then. Back and up’s your first. The muddy hillclimb into Northslope, in the shade of holding-cells and crowcages, guard-barracks for the Uptown Watch. A journey into the city’s uptown to the sound of baying dogs; to the creep of white-edged human eyes on your skin as you pass, if they let you pass at all. Or else you press forward, down, through the constant slough and swampen floor of the Grey Quarter’s lowest point. Gulleybottom, skyless, sun-starving. Where no rain falls but flows all the same, to the throwing-and-forgetting pit all Windhelm holds in common. Where beggars sleep on planks and boards, like rafts above the muck, in the shade of the city’s weight as it towers above them; not just Dunmer now but Nords as well, veterans, maimed too thorough to be heroes, and so ignored. Where savage markets spring up and disappear like mushrooms, here one day and gone the next, selling anything you could want if only you have the coin and know on what day to search for it. Sludge and drowning mud in Winter, and biting flies that live out the cold months by hiding in the folds of your clothes. Churning choking dust in Summer. Gulleybottom, then through and into the Morayat…_

_But if you’ve cunning hands and clever feet. If you’re brave or young or stupid enough – or wise enough to know those three are all the same thing when you boil them down – to risk a fall. If this, if that, if you’re able and willing to climb and crawl, then your options open wide. The Grey Quarter becomes a maze of possibilities. The Rigs and the hot roofs of Crucible. The crawlspaces and crevices of the Combs as they thread through the gully sides. The Warrens dug beneath the Quarter’s lowest reaches._

_And Old Ebonheart’s the same. I’m beginning to learn that through how much it pricks at me to be grounded in a place like this. Mapless, and changed so much from whatever maps might once have been, the streets here make no sense. A labyrinth. When I walk, I walk slow and write every turn in my journal so as not to lose my way. Tall buildings, tall ruins, toppled towers; I’ve got no sense of the wood for I’m too blinded by the trees._

_Until I start climbing._

_Blight my side and how it hurts and blight my starving belly. I need vantage, perspective, to see what’s to be seen._

_I rope my bags together and tie the rope’s end to my belt. I stand at street-level, among the weeds and grasses that overgrow this city, and look up. Who’s to say what the building was before. Now I only see that vines, thick-stemmed and woody, cover one face of its first three storeys and then come balconies, staggered on their way up to its high overhang of roof. And up there is the city as the city sees itself. Up there is the morning light and the sky and the breeze off the sea. A chance of not starving._

_I begin to climb. Focus on my hands, the placing of my feet, and not the warning stretch of my side. To better forget the wound, I focus on memories I’d rather ignore. Climbing when I was still Katharas, days after we left Omayni. It came after the triumph of my ascent; defeat in going down. I remember how my hand slipped just so and my foot scrabbled to make up the difference. A rock that gave way or my foot that gave way, not gripping quite right, and I fell. A slow fall, hurting myself to hold on, scrabble, slow my descent. Like a crowd jeers a prisoner to the pillory, to the crowcage, the rocks and crags clawed at me as I passed. And then I was on the ground. And then I was in Tammunei’s arms. And then I was cleaned, skin showed to them and seen at its red and white worst. But I felt their voice all round me, like a warmth laid over my shame as they sang me whole again._

_The overhang is the hardest part. A leap of faith. I pry my spearhead dagger, picklike and pointdown, into the tiles til it finds a place it will stick. Don’t think of how I’m blunting it at the time. Then I haul, crab over, lie panting on the blue-black shaley surface of the roof. Untied from my belt now, I take the rope in my hands, lean on my back, and pull my baggage up after._

_What I see from the roof is the ocean again, but lit in antique gold. Wincing, clutching my side as it decides whether to start bleeding again, what I see is rooftops on rooftops on caved in rooftops, and a city-that-is overlaying the city-that-was. At street-level, death and dust, but up here is almost the Rigs of my childhood. Structures and spars and scaffolds span between some of the rooftops. Shacks lean against the shattered sides of towers. New brickwork mortared together from old brickwork grows as lichen does on the trunks of long-dead trees._

_And writ all across the distance, in Dyer’s End and beyond, I see rising smoke against the grey-sunned sky. Cookfires, forgefires, kilns. Fire for warmth in Winter, when fire alone fosters life._


	35. Chapter 35

The road went riverlike between long bones of rock and hills grey-green with brush. It followed the lay of the land, meandering down narrow valleys, cresting about the outermost edges of every rill and rise that corrugated the country before Senie.

Simra had never travelled this way. It was independent land; a backwater sworn to no Great House. He’d never had reason to stray here, and had reasons aplenty to travel no further. This road and this way tended eastward. Behind the mountains where the sun rose each morning lay Daen Seeth. A wide wet valley where two rivers ran. The Naddu and the long south-flowing Seeth, that tended from Dhalmora to Mournhold, and then through Dres lands to the sea. But between those rivers and down the Seeth was Temple heartland, the holdings of House Indoril. Best avoided, he reckoned. Best to be cautious.

In swaying pace they followed the track. Two guars, three riders; packs and a plodding pace.

The road was sand and grit underfoot, but the dirt itself was growing darker. Perhaps it was the wet weather: the sky’s attempts at snow, slurried and melting before it reached the ground. But today’s weather was clear, the sky tin-coloured but cloudless, and still the ground seemed darker.

Facing backwards on Tammunei’s guar, Simra chanced on the dry weather and opened out his book-bag, checking his maps one by one. His motions were lazy, tired. His eyes focused slow, taking moments more than usual to read the titles, annotations, the cartographer’s seals. But it was this or stare into space. He’d sooner fill his thoughts, at least as best he could.

The only map that showed this place was the oldest, the vaguest, the largest in scope: the Imperial Cartographical Society’s map, printed on the frontmost pages of his Third Era almanac.

“Ought to reach Senie today,” said Simra. “Reckon we’re in the fork now. Between the rivers.” Weeds and shrubs and heather struggled less on the slopes to either side of the path. Before there’d been nothing but scree, stone the colour of drought. “Map says we’ll find Senie where the waters meet.”

“Does it say anything else?” Tammunei asked. “What kind of a town is it, Senie?”

“No idea. Never been, heard no news. On the map it’s just a name. Then again…”

The map showed this land all but blank. Half-empty but for the to-and-fro of its rivermarks, the name of one town, written in Tamrielic, and all that hedged between hasty-drawn mountains, to north-west and south-east. A lie, that pale bare paper. In truth the country round Senie was folded and ridged, irregular as cloth let to fall in rucks and draperies. Strange and abrupt after the plains, where the sky had seemed more than half of all there was to the world. Here the world rose up to try and hide it.

“Then again what?” Noor put in from where she rode ahead.

“Nothing. Just a shit map is all. Makes everything look empty as everything else.”

“There’s nix in the hills,” said Tammunei. “Kagouti in the tangles of woodland. Their tusks leaves marks on the trunks of the trees and their foraging tills the ground. Groundbirds. Fat white grubs like living scars in the hollows of dead trees. Creeks and streams, newts and minnows. Water flowing under the earth. Nothing’s empty.”

“People?” said Simra.

“I don’t hear any,” Tammunei said. “I’ll tell you if that changes.”

After the sudden squalls and hard-biting breeze of the plains, they travelled low paths now between high places, and the air was calm and windless. More to hear, though. The murmur of trees and heather, and the stutter of loose stones, moving soil. The shriek of distant birds and all the creeping racing sounds of life carrying on, wild and unseen, beyond the edges of the road. This was the sort of wilderness that always made Simra uneasy. The plains were simple, empty, and all but all there was to know about them was there for the eyes to see. But here was a thick and speechless madness of life, impossibly to understand, with too much hidden for comfort.

Tammunei seemed to like it. He caught them humming to themself, adding harmony to a tune only they could hear. A gentle nod with every step of the guar they shared. By the shape of their shoulders, the shape of their silence, Simra would have wagered Tammunei was smiling. Close-lipped, a soft stretch on their heart-shaped face. He knew it well enough. Could picture it easier than stop himself picturing it. That worried him as much as the blind crests of the hills and highlands surrounding them; the dense shadows beneath the deepening trees.

The road turned a left and took on a gentle slope. Midday rose in the sky and then hid between the eaves of a sudden thick-wooded swale. Bare limbed trees and grey craggy bark. Flashes of lichen in warning shades of yellow. Whatever moved amongst the branches, the trunks, the roots, sounded like a rattle of spears, a clutter of bones. Between the high metallic sun and the woodland canopy, the world grew dappled in shades of twilight.

“…fuck this,” Simra muttered.

“D’you fear beasts or bandits?” Noor mocked him.

“Neither… Both. Fuck. This place. Just this place as it is.”

As the road levelled off and wended on through the woods, the dirt of it turned to mud. Water gathered here and stood, stinking, sucking at the feet of their guar. If not for the roots of the trees, Simra reckoned a heavy rain or wet season would have made it a swamp, and only the cold kept the air free of flies.

Moss thrived in the damp, and hung like hair, like curtains, like things squat and cloaked among the branches, deep green and heavy on the leafless trees. Mushrooms peopled the forest floor and the edges of the path.

“Wait.” Tammunei reined in their guar and Noor stopped too, angling her guar half-towards them, showing them its flank. “See those?” Tammunei pointed towards the bole of a great black-barked tree, a little ways from the path. The trunkbelly was ledged with red fungi. “Those are good to eat.”

Simra noted them. Shuffled off the guar’s hindquarters to land crouching on the pathdirt. “I’ll gather us some.” He went to Noor’s guar and untied a saddlesack, going to the tree with the bag’s mouth open. His legs complained, stiff and saddlesore, as he stretched them.

“Beeftongues,” Tammunei called from the saddles as Simra edged a shallow way into the woods. “It’s best to cut them away from the bark. They crumble if you break them off, and then they’re only fit for porridge!”

Simra took out his filleting knife and began to cut, filling the sack with tonguelike lolls of deep-red fungus.

With time the road broke away from the trees and the land began to level. A wide valley between farther flung slopes, terrain cut flat with mattock and pick, and shored with boards and screens of wicker. In the distance, terraces of shrubby trees. The air, the cold, the steam of Simra’s breath all blurred them, but they seemed more regular than wild. Orchards perhaps, or plantings of tea, fruitless and leafless in Winter.

Closer by, around the road, the country was patched together from scraps of plot and field. Wicker breaks split claim from claim. Paddies glinted dark and waterlogged beneath the afternoon sun, divided by banks of packed dark earth. Weeks, months from what ought to have been harvest time, grains and gram stood ripe and forgotten. Hackle-lo and mustardgreens – hardy leaves grown for colder months – lay ready too, between the crop-rows. A new reek hung on the still cool air. A smell balanced between a brewery, a tannery, a midden or a charnel pit, as the red droops of amaranth and white-furred fingers of millet began to rot in the fields.

Simra misliked it. Worse than the woodland, worse than the plains. He waited for someone else to say it. Waited and waited as the guar plodded on. But why would they? How would Noor know the time for sowing and time to get in a yield? Simra, cityborn, only knew from knowing what it meant. These were signs he’d learnt to look out for. Either this was a place where a sellsword could earn coin and their keep, or where a traveller ought to pass quick and faceless through, if they had to pass at all.

“There are bones here,” said Noor. “Unburied, riteless. Something’s wrong.”

Simra cursed his waiting. A prickle of irritation down his spine that he’d not been the one to say it. A dolt without eyes in his head, let alone a sense for the subtle, the spiritual — that’s what she’ll take you for now, Simra, and that’s if she didn’t already. But he set his mouth and straightened his back and silenced that thought as it came. Listened instead. Looked the land over.

To sunward, shapes that moved like nix chased each other between the rows of crops. The stems rustled and flattened as the animals prowled amongst them. Where the millet was flattened they cast long shadows as the haze and hills and sky and sun behind them turned all the colour of copper.

Sometimes a shack or hut stood out from the fields. Brick and adobe in red earth-tones with roofs of thatch. No smoke from any chimney; no light in any of their beady-eyed windows.

“There’s violence here,” Simra said. “Or the shadow left by it. Or the fear of it. This is land people have left behind. Livelihoods abandoned.”

“Why?” Tammunei said.

“Maybe they were running.” Simra shrugged. Not that Tammu would see it so much as feel it, through their back against his back. “Maybe not. Land settles and unsettles quick in Morrowind these days, I reckon. People claim it, lose it, get run off it. This is lordless land, as far as I know. No Great Houses out here to protect it, give their peasants a peace. And the small Houses squabble like growing siblings over scraps at dinner. Odds are as good that this is highborn work as it is that it’s outlaws, bandits. Either way, stinks of war, raiding, spilt out of Summer where it belongs and stretched through Autumn and after…”

“Will Senie be like this too?”

“I don’t know,” Simra admitted. “But it’ll be hungry, that’s for certain. Fuck…if I’d known I might’ve bought more rice.”

“You’ve never been one for charity before…”

Simra’s neck flushed hot beneath the folds of his scarf. “You don’t know that—… I mean, I didn’t mean…” He made a noise in his throat: a rattling sigh. “Fuck. It’d sell. We could’ve sold it. Three, four times its worth? Fuck, forget it. Useless to think what could’ve been anyway.”

The silence that fell after that was prickly, sour on Simra’s tongue as it was in his ears.

Dusk drew on. Here and there, among the shadows, what looked like a half-scythed field. Burst veins of irrigations flooded swathes of land. The hivelike shapes of grainstores rose up, empty no doubt, black against the setting sun.

As he called a magelight against the gathering dark, Simra heard running water. The slow crawl of a wide river. The last sight the sky allowed before it turned full-night was a tall flat plateau ahead, direct in the way of their road. Lamplights and spell-lights glittered and guttered there, scattered throughout the blackness of its looming shape. Walls, townwalls, fortwalls, and the glow of homes and hearths in what windows dared light them.


	36. Chapter 36

_A picture. Picture it._

_The Thief steals into the eastern sky and the dawn breaks fast on its stars. In pink and blue, they are the first to drown. And then its attendant stars, and then the whole east._

_Colour comes back into the world. It pearls and sapphires on the distant sea. Firstlight and frost shiver on another closer ocean and I sit on its shores. The roofs of Old Ebonheart, blue-black and beginning to glitter._

_My knees are hugged to my chest. I am swaddled in all the clothes I own and shivering even so. Coat and mantle of goatskin; motley scarf hooded over and round my head. I’m a son of Skyrim, of sorts, bastard though I might be. I ought to know better, for all I’ve known cold far worse. But I only ever learnt Dunmer ways to deal with Nordic winters. My mother always said to wrap my head and grease my ears else the tips would snap off. But I wonder now if I’d’ve been better served spending longer listening to how Nords weather the cold._

_Harsh nightfrosts in Ebonheart now, and harsher all the time. Last night was stiff and stilled with cold, as if the air itself were frozen. The chatter and screak of nix sounded through the dark. And I strained my ears to hear them come closer, then fall away. And I strained my eyes to stare out through the blackness, hugging myself, and hugging myself, and dreaming the night full of things I dared not sleep for dreading._

_But even if not for fear, hunger keeps me up, or else it’s the cold. The frost finds its way into every corner, and every fold of my clothing, and between every layer I wear. Quiet at first but louder with time, it makes hungry promises about my toes and fingers. A cold and carrion voice. If dawn wakes me, it’s up from a sleep scarce worth sleeping through. So I sit and watch the sky._

_My shelter’s a tall warehouse tower. An island three storeys over everything else nearby. Old Ebonheart was a beautiful city at its height. You can tell that even from its ruins. Cut stone, brick, plaster polished to the sheen of an eggshell, or else painted and engraved. They must’ve thought this tower an eyesore even then. It’s built all of timber and creaks in the slightest breeze. A peaked roof with one corner full-collapsed before I ever got here, and the rest turfed thick with moss. Some of the walls, too, creep with it. Black, blue-grey, cat-eye green; fur and algae. I like to think it crams the cracks in the walls that would elsewise let the draught in. It can’t be eaten so might as well earn its keep some other way. I give it the best of the doubt._

_I sit amongst the cave-in of scattered wooden clinkers from the broken roof. They strew the floor around me. I look out the breach. Inside and all round me is ransack and wreckage. The shatter of boxes and disturbance of dust. I’m not the first to have been here. What was worth taking’s already been gutted. All that was left for me to take was all it had to give. Its emptiness — I laid claim to that a week ago, no ten days ago. In my journal I’ve begun to tally the days off into sevens. It feels a waste of paperspace, of ink, but what am I saving it for now? Tallies and notes. My botched attempts at sketchmaps. I don’t know that it’s much of a diary anymore. I make no records but memory._

_Closer and closer the sun throws its light. I’ll move. Make something of the day. When the sun reaches me, then I’ll move. But it’s hard to imagine it. Hungry, limbs leaden with cold, brain slugging from both, it’s hard to imagine a future here. Just this sitting; this waiting for things to get better._

_The tiles around my tower start to shimmer. It’s the failings in the stoneware slats that throw out the brightest light. The imperfections and faults, flickerflashing in glints of new colour. Salts, crystals, minerals — forgotten on this city’s roofs, except by the searching sun. And me maybe._

 

Outside the yurt that night, on the western edge of Senie, Simra lay awake with his thoughts. He was not pleased with his writing. At best it was joyless, like combing out tangles so bad that shears would’ve done the job better. At worst it felt like picking a scab until the old wound ran new red, and picking and picking on after.

He knew the blighted story, so why was it so hard to get straight? So far as how things wove themselves he knew most of all the answers. Winter in Old Ebonheart, and a hunger and a fear that both made a beast of him and made him feel like the only real person left in the world. Then the world seeming to fill as Spring melted the frosts. Other people, beating the beast out of him, with words and looks and living. Taming him again. The city feeling almost like a city. And the Few in Dyer’s End, and Caselif and all that came after.

Simra knew the story. That was rub enough for him: living as proof of it all. And if he was still writing just for himself then maybe it would be easier. But if not for himself then who was he writing for, and what was it he was writing? Memory or story. Truth or lie or legend. What had he done to warrant the latter? Nothing, he thought, and everything — a life full of all that’d filled it, and nothing much more. He’d be twenty-four in Evening Star. Another Evening Star. Why did Winters come round so often? Who writes a memoir at twenty-four?

Washed in red magelight, Simra leant on the spear he’d taken from the Vereansu they’d fought by the stream. Red and strange-grained wood; halfpoint of its haftlength wrapped in leather; iron head like some oracle’s mask or symbol, one spike leaning forwards, the other hooking back. The buttspike – a scribsticker they’d have called it in the South, but why would anyone want to stick a scrib? – was planted in the ground, rusted already and no doubt rusting further in the damp sod. Simra had told himself he’d sell the spear soon as it stopped being useful. It was a pain to walk or ride with; long and bulky, harder to wear than a sword, even with its carrying straps. But he’d not sold it yet.

The yurt behind him was full of sleeping. Tammunei’s breathing, every out and intake a sigh. Noor’s breathing, a loud silence. For all her charms and protections – the starless night sky overhead as she hid them – they’d been shot at this same evening. Ought to have someone on watch, he’d reckoned, and it might just as well be him.

They’d skirted round the townwalls as evening steeped into night. Soon as they came in bowshot, a clatter of arrows sheared down to tell them so. All but silent until they stuck black lines into the turf and sent the two guar rearing and shying. Warning shots, Simra reckoned, or else they’d have struck their marks. When he’d looked up to the walls he saw lights moving, hurrying atop them: a squabble of archers, debating another volley. Best to fall out of range again before they could reach a verdict.

The walls skirted all the way round. Senie was more fort than town, perched on high ground at the fork of two rivers. It made sense. A hardhold to guard the Plains from what lay east of them, and this valley from what lived on the plains. Something to play sentinel over all who’d ford the river here. What spoilt the sense of it all were the empty fields, the manned walls, the arrows from out the night sky. Closed gates, no doubt. What were they warding off?

They travelled as far in the dark as they dared and pitched camp beside the river. A haze of lights had shown gold in the distance, arrayed on the water’s far side. Trust in dawn to put the night’s happenings together, make sense of them, or so Simra had decided. But the night was too full of questions to let the answer of sleep suffice.

Simra’s mind fell and filled with noise. Like the sound of cicadas, harping senseless in a hot and Summer dark. He shifted his weight between the cold lumps of his booted feet. Almost laughed aloud. A helpless cough of almost-laughter. What kind of prick writes a memoir at twenty-four? It was embarrassing. Hard to tell what he wanted more: to write again, starting over, or to have never started at all.

Uprooting the spear, Simra walked a few pointless steps, then circled round the yurt.   
One of the guar reached its neck out long and twisted it to look back along its haunches with one cattle-gentle eye. It narrowed a slit pupil against his light; focused on him, then focused on nothing. A translucent lid veiled over its eye as it slipped partway into sleep. Simra wondered if it was still watching though, wary through the lid that clouded its eye more than closed it. A prey beast’s hunted half-sleep. Clever trick if you can do it, he thought. It’d save him his old trick with the kettle, the stone, the palm held closed around it, hanging ready above the other.

He’d asked once, and asked it to someone who ought to know: Why did Saint Vivec write the Sermons? He’d put on his best pious voice; the eager curiosity of ignorance. He’d gone by the name of Lyros then, and that was how Lyros spoke, at least to Meris. Sharp but unpolished, Lyros. Learning, but always humble enough to know there was more to learn. So why write the Sermons?

And Meris had said to him – to Lyros – Why write the Sermons at all, or why write them the way they are written?

Both, he’d said. It had been Spring then. The season’s high crux where Summer shows in at the seams of things, hot and turning the morning mists, heavy and warm as steam, to dust. But Meris’ library was a buried place, half-sunk beneath Suran, and even that afternoon it was cool, and full of the silence of books. Both, he’d said, and neither. Why did Saint Vivec write so much about himself, and so little of it believable?

Saint Vivec was a saint, Meris had answered. Do you know what a saint is? (Of course he knew what a blighted saint was, but she’d tell him anyway.) Someone, she’d said, who in death, is an ancestor not just to their line, but to all Dunmer of faith. Someone, she’d said, who led a life from which others would do well to learn.

Then why tangle it all up? Wrap all the facts in metaphor so tight their truths are muffled. Or hidden. The egg and the simulacrum? It can’t be true.

Vivec lies, Meris said with a shrug and patient smile. There are some in my order who’d say he tells falsehoods to hide the falseness of his godhead. I prefer a more clement reading. Vivec lies to remind the Dunmer of the lessons Black-Hands Mephala once taught us. Words define truth. Lies become stories, and how do we know the world except by tales we tell each other, and tales we tell ourselves? Vivec was born a wretched thing, and lowly. He knew that to be all he could, he would have to change what he had been.

So the Sermons… They change that, and they teach us about the power there is in doing so?

And Meris had answered: If you are to be born a ruling king of the world you must confuse it with new words. The sermons open with the egg, and they too are the egg. A rebirth.

Simra breathed on his fingers now and flexed them, stretching the stiffness from them. They fanned before his eyes. The outer blade of his right palm, bandaged, black with ink, and for what? To tell it aloud and abroad, singular and clear — hadn’t that been his intention, before he’d ever started this mess? But his past, too, was a mess of pasts, and the signs of his passing left in his wake were a scattered seeding of stories, reputations, rumours. The deeds of false names; false mer who’d looked a little like him, in the right light, the right place, the right time.

Bring it all together. Harvest what you’ve sown, Simra. Own it again. Be all you’ve been. Maybe you’ll even learn to live with it. Like flesh slowly swallows the splinter you can’t unstick if only you stop fucking picking at it. Let scab turn to scar.

He unwrapped the bandage on his hand. Outermost three fingers pale and bloodless; scarred to the knuckle and in streaks across his palm, above and below. Who writes a memoir at twenty-four? he thought again, and thought he knew the answer. Someone born wretched, who had lived wretchedly, and lived now with all that defining him. Define him, would it? He’d define it right back. In writing, rewrite it. Not to correct or undo, but to set it straight, and all in his name. Simrin, Katharas, Lyros, Nimmun — all unravelled at the stroke of a pen, till only Simra was left.

He stabbed the spearbutt once more into the ground to stand it there. Crouched and laid his hands to the grass. A muttered calling, and the frost began to melt, the grass to dry and cinder. He sat. Put his satchel over his lap and brought out paper, ink. Began again to write.

 

_“Time to get up,” I say, and do nothing._

_Instead I think about the Nords in northern Skyrim who stitch themselves into their Winter clothes – their furs and wools and fleeces – and only bathe again when Spring melts the ice on the ocean. And I think about the coiled copper snake on my left forearm, sinking the pattern of its scales slow into my skin._

_Take myself by surprise, that’s the only way. I lurch backward and into my shelter, to go through my things._

_On a stand of scavenged rooftiles sits the cast-iron pot I found. I hauled it on a rope up the side of the tower. I did the same with the tiles, filling my gathersack with them and pulling and pulling it, hand over hand, til I could empty and arrange them onto the floor. Four days ago I boiled three racer’s eggs in the pot. Took them from their nest, four streets over. Heated the water with magicka, expending myself til I started to sweat, ache in my head and joints and the pit of my stomach. I didn’t dare brave the smoke of a cookfire. I ate the eggs with salt — nothing else after all to save it for. Nearby, the rags and clothes I bed down in._

_I fetch my waterskin from amongst my bags. I tilt it over my mouth and wring a few drops from it._

_“You’ll need to go out,” I say. “No food. Last of your water. Best go out.” I speak patois when I’m alone. The Grey Quarter’s hybrid tongue. Not my mothertongue, but the tongue that raised me all the same._

_Over my shoulder, smoketrails go up from the city’s overscape. The others are cooking breakfast. The countless others I share this city with, as I try best I can to live beneath their notice. I wonder sometimes: Would they help me if they knew I was here? The answer’s the same, I suppose, to whether I’d help them. So I stay hidden, stay clear, and scavenge and ragpick my way through the city, in fear of sight, of sound — any break in my aloneness._

_Down then, by rope and scrabbling feet. Stomach growling, I make towards the nearest trail of smoke. Rooftops and wreckage. Through the shattered top of what once was a glassgarden, I smell meat, the sizzle-sweetness of frying fat. And if ever I had a choice to turn back before, it’s gone now: the first thing my hunger’s devoured in days._


	37. Chapter 37

Downriver a line crossed the water. A slack rope that traced over the fine skin of ice near the banks, and trailed beneath the surface in the middle of its slow dark flow. A flat square barge was moored up on the far side. Its frame was lashed together from wood and a patchwork of leather and cloth stretched between the spars to form a kind of deck. At waterlevel, leather bladders tight-full with air kept the barge afloat.

“Fucking boatmer…” Simra grumbled under his breath. His purse had barely recovered from the route they’d taken down the Balda. “Fucking pirates, all of them…”

“Ho!” The cry came across the water. Already the ferryman was picking the rope from the water with leathermittened hands and beginning to pull. “Ho there trav’lers! Fine fair mornin’!”

Tammunei looked skyward and frowned. The weather was tin-grey and threatened drizzle. No sky for how thick it was banked in clouds and all the colour of cinders. The sort of sun you had to search for, active and earnest, squinting after some small change in light. And all around the river, the grasses were bearded with frost, the reeds frozen stiff and pale.

“You think so?” Simra called back.

“Nothin’ too bad, nothin’ too bad at all… Still workin’, am I not? A dear fine mornin’, then! A fine dear fair morning…”

A fine fair blighted grey morning to squeeze coin out of the choiceless, Simra reckoned. They were in the crutch of two rivers now, the better part of a day’s travel deep, and could either cross the water or else turn round and hope to skirt it. Fording the flow was scarce any choice at all in this cold and the ferryman knew it. That accounted for his grin, Simra thought, as the barge drew up closer. Or might be that was just his teeth.

The ferryman was Orsimer. Tall and broad in the shoulders but otherwise rangy as a skinned hare, to reckon what you could through the heavy outdoor clothes he wore. A short waxed cape, its hem tasselled with beads, was draped round his shoulders and chest, front and back. It hung to his waist and clattered as he moved. He wore a short coat under it of parchment yellow roughcloth, quilted and padded into squares and diamonds. Almost an arming garment, Simra reckoned — almost a soldier’s aketon. A long grey kilt was belted over that, its skirts girded up and backward between his legs, to show his wiry-haired calves and bare green-grey feet. From out the back of his broad conical farmer’s hat, a thick braid of black hair hung heavy over one shoulder and down his chest, to end in a clattering black iron bell. Like you’d collar a cow with, Simra thought. How long since he’d last seen a cow? He’d seen ‘beef’ for sale in Narsis – he’d never eaten it; wouldn’t know the difference after all – but if beef was dear in Skyrim, whatever passed as cowflesh in Morrowind was sold at thrice the cost. He’d seen no cattle in years…

A wheeze of filled air-skins; a grind of silt. The barge bumped onto the near bank. Its ferryman looked them over, counting them slow and careful. He stood on the boatside like it was a rampart, and he looking down from the high-ground. Confident as anything, swagger even in his stillness as he put hands to hips and leaned in, nodding slow as he spoke:

“Three of you, is it? Mmmh. And two o’ them, hm? Guars…” He drawled over the word, butchering its plural. Simra noticed one of his hands rested casual near a bone handle wrapped into the folds of his kilt’s belt. A half-hidden knife.

“How much?” Noor said.

“Hold on.” Simra shuffled and slipped from the back of the guar he and Tammunei shared. He stumped the butt of his spear against the sod. Strolled in reach of the ferryman. Stumped the spear again into the dirt, ponderish, and looking at the rusted spike as it bothered the frosty grass. “Conversation first. Fine morning for it, right? What’s closed Senie up so tight? What’s that?”

Simra pointed with his free hand downriver, towards the fork where Senie sat on its hill and behind its walls. Smoke rose from the river’s opposite side, trails on trails into the sky where they hung together, mingling in the windless heights. Simra’s hand flashed silver proudflesh and three pale fingers as he gestured. Red beads around the wrist, and plaited silk threads hung with teardrop pendants of green trueglass. Then the rags that bound his sleeves in, to wrap and safeguard the warmth of his body.

“Depends as what it’s worth to you, knowing,” said the ferryman.

“Nothing overmuch,” said Simra. “Except that it’ll help us decide if we want to cross or turn back. Use your fine-looking boat or not.”

The Orsimer stuck out his jaw and twitched his lower lip. “Not heard then, have you?”

“No news from down the road our way, no.”

“Huh. Overtaken, Senie is. Some scuffle inside, two months back might’ve been. All I know’s their lord and council — they strung them from the walls. Hooks in them. Bled or parched to death, all of them by now.”

“Why?”

“Something about their gods. Your gods. What-you-will.” The Orsimer shrugged. “Want to be left alone is how it seems to me.”

“Know the feeling, but never so much that I’d shoot at someone who came too close.”

“Not hurt, are you?” The ferryman sounded almost concerned. “Could be I’d have saved you that near scraping. Don’t go downstream, that’s what I say, but there’s been plenty crossing down here.”

“Which gods?” said Tammunei.

“Eh?” Another shrug from the ferryman. “How should I know? Three of them.”

“Which three?”

“Ffah. How should I know?”

“Hm. And them camped on the far side of the fork,” said Simra. “Who’s that?”

“Some army brought in from eastward over the mountains.”

“Indoril then,” Simra said.

“Some scouts of theirs I ferried over. Oh, two yest’days back and of a mornin’. If they’ve come back since then, it’s not been with me. What they’d be doin’ over from eastward and here in Winter, I surely don’t know… They were asked here’s what they said.”

“That all they said?”

“That and something about pulling some priest out the fort by his hair. They said plenty ‘bout that.”

Borderguards and ferrymen, bridge and gate sentries — you could always trust them to have news worth sharing. Seemed this ferryman wasn’t yet well-versed in that side of his chosen career.

“Been here long?” Simra asked. “At this pitch with your boat?”

“Long enough,” said the ferryman, defensive. “Work’s good lately. Picked right up, it has. Not used to folk wantin’ so much of a chat though, can’t say I am. Most part it’s that they’re in too much of a hurry to cross. You? Two journeys, I’d say. You and your beast, then yous and yours. Extra, that is.”

“How much?”

The two crossings came to a yera and two in total. A shil per passenger and another two for each journey over. Simra had been gouged worse before, but he’d also known plenty work for longer than this ferryman and earn less for it. Still, fair’s fair, even when it’s not fair to you. Given the one boat on this bridgeless length of river, Simra would’ve charged higher — that if only for the boredom of being a ferryman in the first blighted place.

First Simra, Tammunei, their lighter-laden guar. Then Noor and the packguar. Simra watched over the water as the ferryman’s mouth moved, trying for talk, his jaw jutting and juddering. Noor’s mouth stayed firm shut. The beasts peered over the boatsides, one staring deep into its own murky reflection, the other peeking and balking and shying from the water until it was sound and stable-footed on the other bank once more.

On this side of the river, the fields were stripped bare. Paddies deep with frozen mud and ice-chased standing water. Ditches to draw the river and feed the crops stooped much the same: gutters of filth and frost. Rows of fruit-shrubs, bare and stiff, skinny at the trunk and skinny at the limbs. A path of stripped earth ran along beside the water.

Tammunei didn’t remount the guar. Give it a rest, they said, after the water and carrying two riders for so long. The three of them and their two mounts plodded along at footpace. They tended towards the smoke, downriver to the fork and the camp. A wordless verdict between them.

“Is there any need?” Noor said.

“To go through the camp?” Simra said. “A few needs, yeah.” Not that he liked it any more than she did, though he fancied their reasons differed. “Food’s the foremost, if you want to know.”

“We can forage. Hunt. Ghosts preserve me but surely you can go a few days without rice.”

“Forage.” Simra snorted. “In the wake of all them? You heard the orc. They came from eastward. We’ll be tracking back the way they marched from, down the Davon’s Watch road. If you think there’ll be anything left to glean where an army’s foraged through..? Nchow. The pickings’ll be poorer than piss-poor. I’d bet on it. Gold or glass, I’d bet on it any day.”

“You said they were Indoril,” Tammunei began. “New Temple Ordinators…”

“Some of them. The officers maybe. I’d say mercenaries and levies for the rest.”

“I’d have thought Ordinators would mean honour, discipline, restraint…”

“They’re no guarantee of good behaviour, if that’s what you mean. Or good supply lines for that matter. Some people, you give them a bronze mask and they’ll hide all they can behind it. Do whatever they’d never dared to do, and say, no, now it’s for the cause…”

“Will it be safe then?”

“We’re wisewomer,” said Noor. “Sacred servants of the oldest ancestors, the oldest gods. The baelathri Temple reclaimed them only lately, but we’ve given the gods their due since Veloth’s day. They love us now as much as they hated us before. Of course we’ll be safe.”

“Mmh. They love the idea of you fine enough,” muttered Simra. “It’s when you’re there before their eyes, all skins and beads and braids, they decide they’ve got a problem…”

Tammunei shied close to their guar, edging into its neck and putting both hands on its leading-bridle.

“We’ll be safe,” Noor repeated, firmer now.

“Course we will,” said Simra, “if we keep each other that way.”

Senie’s outer walls showed smooth and slightly sloping in the nearing distance. Brick and mortar the colour of bones til they seamed down into the sides of the hill the fort-town had its roots on. There the incline slacked and tumbled in heather and crags of stone to the brown waters where the rivers combined.

Around the three on the riverside path, a feeble breeze picked up, fretting with their hair and the hems of their clothes. None were dressed for Winter, or a journey slow-leading into lands with colder climes. Stupid of them, Simra reckoned. Of him most of all. Noor in her tasselled blanket-cloak and shawl, her ragged threadbare riding-coat — she was best prepared, for all she looked like a small and lope-stepping scarecrow in those tatters. But Tammunei had only the coat Simra had given them, ocean-coloured, with a recent-patched hole in the gut of it. And Simra himself had no coat, no cloak at all.

“What’re the other reasons?” said Tammunei.

“Hm?”

“We could just carry on past. Follow the road when it turns east. But we won’t because of food, and what else?”

“Oh.” Simra shrugged, and fidgeted with his fingers and the shaft of his spear. “Sheer bloodyminded curiosity. Wanna know what’s happening here. We got less than half a story from that bastard ferryman. I want the whole fucking thing.”


	38. Chapter 38

Like a hermit crab in its shell, the camp sheltered in the shape of something older than itself. An outfort to the town’s main walls, it was built at a point where the river bent double; a narrow horseshoe of land divided from Senie by a longshot of wide brown water. Shallow trenches full of weeds and brambles surrounded the outfort. With the dirt dug from them, a low but steep-sided hillock formed its foundations. At the slope’s crest, black tumbles of teardown stone. In places they stood as sections of wall. Elsewhere they lay strewn in blocks and shatters down the hillside and into the ditch.

“Did the Red Year do that?” Simra asked aloud. “Can’t’ve been. Main walls held up just fine by the look of things…” On the river’s far side, the townwalls stood high and solid, a little more sloping than sheer. Designed like that they’d stand against tremors and ashstorms just as well as they would against scalers, siege engines, war-spells. “Reckon the ones holed up inside tore them down when they heard they’d have company. Anything to make things harder on the enemy at their gates. Mad. Why’d they not just run?”

But the camp had grown, settled in, and rebuilt the outfort as best it could. The ground beyond its perimeter was rough and barren with siegeworks. Furrowed, ploughed into long puddles and scrapes of grassless mud where treetrunks had been cut from arbours and copses, dragged from nearby woodlands to build stakes and palisades — perhaps ladders and rams. Wood walls faced the waterfront. On the camp’s landward sides, the fortifications were lighter: arrowscreens of woven reeds and barricades of branches, half-frozen mud. Here and there, sections of the old stone walls still stood, making mock of the makeshift defences around them.

“Not the best work,” said Simra as they drew closer. Thirty strides from the ditch, twenty, fewer and fewer. Sentries scurried and busied themselves behind the barricades. He saw them by their spearheads, waving above the barriers. “Can’t be they just got here, can it, but they’re barely settled in.”

“How do you know all this?” Noor asked over the neck of her guar as she walked beside it.

“Guesswork.” Simra shrugged. “You ever play that game where you sit somewhere – by a street or something – and you see who goes by? Make up who they are, where they’re going, what they want?” He and Soraya used to. Crouched on rooftops, looking down at the crowds passing below. Chuckled to each to the other as they told tales and shared black fake secrets about the strangers they saw. “You look, you think, you guess. Practice enough and sometimes you guess right. It’s like that.”

“Swordwork more like,” said Tammunei, almost scoffing. “You’ve been a sellsword, the same as the ones up ahead. You know because you’ve seen this before.”

“Tsscht. Only often enough to know it’s not worth the pay to get in fights with walls involved. Not on either side of the wall. Digging ditches, keeping water boiling, days and days; the stink of pitch, starving, sleeping scarce more than a blink at a time? Or sitting and waiting too close to where you shit. Just waiting? And anycase you’re paid to plug a gap in the fucking wall. Pushing through or pushing back, it’s foolswork, deadly and clumsy, and dead mercs don’t get paid.” Simra had spoken too sharp, answered too quick. He’d shown a scar that still itched. He backtracked, softening his tone. “Don’t need to be an expert to know the work of an amateur, that’s all.”

Tammunei didn’t press the issue. Simra was grateful for that much.

Soon they stood on the edge of the ditch. Simra squinted up the slope, waiting to be challenged. A mer in a coifed leather cape and ugly pot of a bonemould helmet called down from the barricade:

“Who goes! Warn you, I’ve got two crossbows looking at you. Speak true and speak clear, stranger!”

Two crossbows? One too few, Simra thought. Must be understrength to landside with the best part of their number watching the river. “Just travellers,” he called back to the sentry. “Traders, if you’ll have us. No one you need to worry about if not.”

Voices spoke low behind the barricade. “Come your way up,” the sentry said at last. “Only slow. And tell me your name.”

Simra stiffened and his spine crawled. He knew enough scraps of Temple magic to know it was best you lie or keep your name to yourself where Ordinators are involved. Remember Galgas, bound by his name. Remember Meris, the patient hungry waters… But this sentry was no Ordinator. Just a lean and plain-faced girl in a bad helmet, bored and glad in equal parts to be guarding the backlines, away from the front. “Simra Hishkari,” he said.

And they picked their way across the ditch and up the earthworks after. Voices floated down from above, squabbling idle amongst themselves.

“You sure they’re not from Senie? Could be they came round and over. Spies, could be.”

“Nchow,” said the sentry who’d spoken before. “They’ve got guar. Think there’s a guar from in those walls that’s not been eaten already?”

Simra, Noor, and Tammunei skirted along one side of the slope, making for a break in the barricade. Another sentry met them there. Human, parchment-skinned with bushy close-drawn eyebrows. A brow-guard of iron disks brimmed around the front of their head, and about their shoulders they wore a straw raincloak. A crossbow showed from beneath the cloak, slung on a strap from their chest. With a short pike levelled at Simra’s flank, they edged back, wary, and guided them watchful through.

“Besides,” said the first sentry to the other two. “They’re Ashlanders.”

“Eh?” said the one with the pike.

“Well?” said the first sentry: Pot-Helm, loudest of the three. “You are, aren’t you? Ashlanders?”

Noor stood rooted, scowling wordless at the sentries. Tammunei looked at Simra. He nodded for all three of them, brief and curt.

“Told you.”

“Why’d it make a difference?” said the third sentry: a bare-headed mer with stubble on his scalp and stubble on his jaw, and two ragged claw-scars down one cheek. He still had a crossbow cocked and aimed at Tammunei.

“If they’re Ashlanders,” Pot-Helm explained, “they’re not very well gonna be heretics, are they?” A short bleat of laughter. “Ashlanders fighting to keep the Old Tribunal. Can you imagine? By the three, where’d you leave your wits? Sand there,” she jerked her head to the human with the pike, “he’d have an excuse, but you..?”

Simra’s eyes lingered on the cocked crossbow. Its sights bobbed as Claw-Scarred joined in the laughing. A small and niggling fear, that. Like feeling back with the tip of your tongue and finding a tooth’s begun to come loose. Simra had seen the blighted things go off at one knock of the elbow or twitch of the finger, and what then?

“Nice to be so well trusted,” Simra said, cold. “You mind if we carry on? Daylight’s wasting.”

Pot-Helm waved them through, still laughing dry and quiet.

A shanty sprawl of canvas, pitchpoles, mist-damp leather. Tents on tents by the hundred. Paths too narrow for the gauge of carts wound between the tent-struts, the taut tent-stays, the tangled lines of their moorings. There was the reek of latrine-pits Simra had promised, never in sight but never far off. In calm-winded weather every scent seems to come from upbreeze. Every way they might walk was aslurry with mud and the black standing brack of foul water.

“I see why you wouldn’t miss it,” said Noor. “Living like this.” Her face was drawn – eyes narrow, brows lined, the bridge of her nose wrinkling – somewhere between pity and disgust.

“Wouldn’t be surprised to find Vereansu here,” Simra said. “Among the mercenaries. You’d think the others would take after their example. Learn to lay a camp right.”

“We were a tent-people once, all of us. A long-lived people… How did the baelathri forget so readily? There must be hundreds here, and all penned into a camp I could shoot across, one side to the other.”

“They chose walls over air, sky, freedom.” Tammunei spoke, head angled at the ground, the mud on their boots already. Hair hanging red and heavy as sumacs after rain. They were listening. “Defences. Safety. They’ve been promised everything, but expect the worst. They feel unsafe here. Unlucky here…”

Simra knew that feeling. Waiting, and hating the waiting, but fearing worse what would end it. Mole, mine, breach, and the brave mad fools who volunteered to be first in, and the rest drawing lots for the shit luck of going with them. The push and crush and horror of stamping shuffling feet. The soft ground, swamped with blood and the whole sour putrid spill of battle, and the humid choke of the air in a Southern Deshaan Summer… If I go under. If I slip. You’ll drown in the mud, Sim; be milled to nothing by the press of boots… He knew it well enough.

“Not fucking surprised,” Simra said. “Come on. You keep listening for bad luck and ill omens. I’ll sniff us out a quartermaster, shall I?”

He led them round the camp’s outskirts, keeping to landward. Barricades and stakes on their right, and the blackened scraps of the outfort walls. Camp-followers, urchins in dirt-coloured clothes, scrambled between the tents and down its lean and winding causeways. In their arms and on their backs were bales of arrows and javelins, sacks of provisions, oiled bags that clacked and clanked and whispered with the sound of metal, mail, chitin plate and scale.

The cram and clamour and reek of it all. It was almost enough to make Simra grateful for his days with the Vahn. Grateful that the Vahn had been what it was: a small company, regimented within reason, organised, with Ra’baali telling the most clueless among them they’d better find somewhere else to pitch their bloody tent. But this was a rabble. The Temple must have put out a general call and had more show out than they’d hoped for. Chaos, poised to collapse under its own weight.

The bulk were men and women in ragged travelling clothes with a helmet, a spear, a hunter’s bow perhaps. Part-time bandits come back to the light of civilisation, lured in by the certainty of some slipshod little salary and the promise of a sack when Senie fell. The occasional high-skulled and marked Vereansu warrior, sullen-faced as they went dismounted among the settled-folk and footlings, bow-holster and quiver at their belts. That only made the seldom exceptions stand out all the more.

Simra spied a tall mer, some once-Redoran sor’shil by his look: long-handled sabre at rest on his shoulder, strutting down the lines in patchwork armour and wrapped up in the kind of pride that grows like a scar over deep-set shame. Simra dropped his eyes, did his best impression of nobody at all, and passed by.

Later, still walking the perimeter and listening for hawking voices, looking for rising smoke, Simra caught a bright glint from the corner of his eye. Sunlight striking tarnished bronze, shaped into a blank merish face, long black holes where its eyes ought to be. A grey plume of fabric drooping down behind. Chest tightening, tongue stiff, Simra looked, and tried not to look like he was looking.

They were Ordinators. Two of them in plumed masks and split-skirted robes of pale blue silk, hems flecked black with mud. Sharing a clearing amongst the tents they circled, fell still, shifted stance and guard. One with a great straight field-sword, only a head shorter than its wielder was tall, and the other with a long-shafted mancatcher, they sparred, practiced their forms. Mechanical, masked, silent and perfect as illustrations from some manual of arms.

“This way!” Simra hissed, and turned Noor, Tammunei, and the guar away from the clearing. “Think I smell smithies!” He hurried, lengthening his stride, walking fast as he could. A secret retreat.


	39. Chapter 39

Forges and kilns squat in the clearing, stout as beehives built from clay. A dozen smiths, fletchers, armourers, and their prentices squabbled over the flames. Streams of sparks marked their words; blades thrust into coals or quenching vats. Half-drowning their arguments, the dinning strike of hammers and the offbeat grunt of anvils. Soldiers and sellers of food hustled through with clay pots and boxes, jars sealed with twine and layers of parchment, to set their food a-simmer amongst the hot and grey-white ashes. Smoke billowed, chasing itself, then fleeing before the wind.

But that was only the heart of things. A beat like iron and oil for blood — it dinned on, battling itself, but Simra reckoned it was faltering. The smiths were doing all they could to look and sound busy. Bothered over the same bits of haggard spare metal, rummaged with pokers at the coals, howled at their prentices for more air to the bellows. They fought amongst themselves for something to do. And all the while they scarce turned out an arrowhead. A waste of tar and charcoal and a waste of wasted time.

Whereas the clearing’s edges bristled and thronged. From mats and shacks and yawn-mouthed tents, people peddled boredom, and cures for it, and more pleasant ways to pass it by.

“Scents! Musks! I have hormones, pheromones, ambergris!”

“When were you last clean, sera? I tell you, I have soaps, water hot as any foyada you care to name! And the tub I have? Why, you could stretch your legs full out and still have room to wriggle with glee! One at a time, sers, one at a time — an orderly line, sera, one at a time if you please…”

“Poultices! Cures for callus you’d walk three days barefoot for..!”

“Faces mirrored, hair trimmed, beards cut! And if you have a tooth that pains you..?”

“Tea! Shein! What you will! Who are we to judge you either way? Who are we indeed to judge! Broths on the boil and straight to your bowl! Line the tables, warm the seats!”

“Pathetic…” Simra grunted under his breath.

“What?” said Tammunei.

They were quiet, huddling close as a cub to its mother, still yet to learn it too has claws. Marketplaces, voices, the crowd and clamour — like they thought Simra could shield them from it all. But that’s the way with crowds, Simra thought. You aren’t in the crowd; you are the crowd, unapart from it. Same for cities and battles and all. How do you save someone from your own self?

“Said it’s pathetic,” Simra answered. “Scrubbed clean, all of it. A camp full of soldiers and mercenaries, and not a glint of gambling in sight. Place like this ought to be red as Autumn with bedworkers’ tents and their caterwauling from inside… They’re not selling leisure here, they’re selling fucking prudence, moderation, temperance. If those were worth tuppence then they wouldn’t come for free.”

He cut himself short but the curse came all the same. Blighted Indoril; he thought it almost aloud. But in a place that forced bedworkers into silence, and dens for sujamma and skooma into hiding, no telling where muttering the wrong thing might get you. They were all still here – the gamblers and bedworkers and dealers of sharps and numbs – Suran had taught him that much. Only they’d be buried; their goods pricier, hawked in whispers. All it takes is for one stiff robe to call something sin and the whole underbelly of things changes. For every red tent taken down and every red lamp snuffed out, another goes up in secret, charging higher for the risk and the lacquer-black gleaming novelty of the forbidden.

“I thought we were here for provisions,” Noor said.

“We are,” said Simra.

“Yet you’re mourning pleasures you might’ve bought.”

“And where’re all these provisioners you’re seeing, hm? Could it be my license and love for the profligate have blinded me to them? What d’you see with your truer purer eyes, talsintushpi?” A sour pause as Simra waited for a response that never came. “Tsscht. Thought not. Nothing here but watery broth and sawdust dumplings and bug-musk by the jar-full, and I’d bet even that’s two-thirds fake.”

Long tables spilt out from the mouth of a wide yellow tent. Days of steam had left patches on the canopy, permanent damp, dark as mustard. A few handfuls of mercenaries slumped at the trestles. Pipesmoke; stale panbreads picked at with fingerless-mittened fingers; black crescent-moons under grubby nails. Men and women, Dunmer in the main, with hollow eyes and looks curdled with hunger.

Simra slouched down beside one. A Dunmer. He might’ve been stout once, but the flesh lay slack on him now. He wore a greasy red cloak, ill-darned in a half-dozen places. The strap of his belt hung in excess past his pad-armoured knees from all the times he’d tightened it, stabbing new holes through the leather. At his hip a wicked-wide shortsword, sling, and stone-pouch. A dished round shield of bonemould and a battered bronze helmet sat on the bench beside him.

“Using those soon, d’you reckon?” Simra tapped his fingernails against the helmet’s crest. It belled dull and quiet at his touch.

The mercenary turned a pouchy red eye on Simra. A spark of fury showed for a moment – the interruption, the gall of a stranger touching his armour maybe – and then went lax and left. “What’s it to you?” he said. “Looking to join the party, latecomer?”

“Me? No. Nah. Not me. Means more for you though, right? Me, I don’t even know who’s fighting who.”

“Hm.” Something moved the mercenary’s mouth, like working up and holding back the urge to spit. “No news where you came from?”

There was a bite and bristle in that, Simra thought — rank hypocrisy from a mer whose accent was scarce a scratch more native than his own. “Not down the road to south and west, no,” Simra said, keeping his tongue, keeping sweet and bland. “So what’s the word? Heretics, I heard.”

“Almsivists,” the mercenary grunted. “Sprouted up in the town months back. Some priest, young and bright eyed, on the run from out east. He comes in Senie one day looking a mixer, a freak. Says he’s had some vision that the Tribunes ain’t gone, only hiding. Testing us, like. Says he had a vision from Saint Ayem herself to tell him so. And on the steps of the Temple he offs his robes and shows how he’s mottled like a piebald guar — starting to turn gold, he says. Chimer-gold in patches like some pox. They lock him up of course, the Templers, but a week goes by and the city’s set him free and they’ve thrown out or killed all the Templers instead. Calling themselves the Uncursed. Locked up in there, wanting nothing to do with what’s outside while they wait on the Tribunes’ return. Something like that…”

“Something like that?”

“What I said, innit? For all I know they’re all in there, turning gold in their own sweet time.” The mercenary’s mouth worked again. This time he did spit, whitefroth and thick on the ground.

“Why the siege then? If they’re just waiting, not fucking with anyone, why bother? Just let ‘em starve behind their walls.”

The mercenary rolled his shoulders. A shrug that clicked his back and tensed his thick slack neck. “Some of the folk they threw out? Lords, merchants, priests — them as ran Senie, or as good as ran it. ‘Spose they want their town back, and before Winter sets in proper. Impatient bastards, throwing out money like that. Going begging to the Indoril…” He looked over his shoulder and hurried to speak on. “Not like I’m making plaints, mind. It’s them pays my pocket, and them that’ll see us over the walls, innit? And ‘sides, killing heretics?” A hollow laugh, shrill with worry. “I’d do that for free, right?”

Simra drummed his fingertips again on the helmetcrest. His neck itched and his scalp crawled. He looked round slow, casual as he could. Masks and plumes and pale blue silk, caught in the corner of his eye before he turned back. Ordinators, walking the marketplace. Don’t run. Don’t flee or they’ll think you’ve got a reason. Same as the Quarter; the uptown watch with their dogs and their brutal boredom. He stayed seated.

“Right you are… I’m travelling their way and all,” Simra said, sunny. “Sure someone’d thank me when I got to Daen Seeth if I came full of stories. Breaking the walls at Senie; taking back its streets. But time’s short, more’s the pity.”

The mercenary cast a measuring eye over Simra. Took in his travelling clothes, his armoured knees, sword and blades and all, then looked back to the table. His eyes wouldn’t answer the question so he had to put it in words. “Sellsword too then, are you?”

“Something like that, when it suits.”

“Not a soldier though,” the mercenary said. Something about his posture bristled.

Simra eased his hand away from the mer’s helmet. The threat hung thicker between them now — some posture or challenge in unspoken issue. “Not if I can help it, no,” Simra smiled; a closed twist of the lips. “I’m all sorts besides, but today I just wanted news. Grain too – provisions – if you know someone who’s selling..?”

The mercenary spoke after a curt pause. “Heading out east, you said? Hm. You’ll need it. Might be I know a man’s got some spare…”

Simra’s scarred hand slipped into his jacket. Found out a pocket in its stitched silk lining and fished two coins from its narrow mouth. Shils of tin and russeted iron, loose and stamped with holes; he laid them down on the tabletop. “For your help.”

“You’ll want to walk off that way.” The mercenary skimmed the coins off the table and into his palm to grease and grow warm there. He nodded a path through the tents. “Look for what’s left of the Black Lamps company. Reckon you can imagine what their standard looks like. Had a spill in the first try at the walls and now they’re supplied for more heads than they’ve got. They’ll not be raring to the breach again any time soon so they’re not counting on a good pillage. Been foraging hard instead. Might be they’ll see you right…”

“Grateful,” said Simra. Rising from the bench, his knees and hipjoints argued. Saddlesore, travelsore, aged before he’d grown old. A brief grimace pulled at his face before his muscles and bones fell silent.

“Same,” the other mer said with a backtip of his head, a jutting upnod of his chin.

“Good luck then. Y’know. When the time comes.”

You’ll need it, Simra thought. When the times comes, you’ll need helmet and shield and luck and more. Mole, mine, breach; the threat and promise that pushed comers forward and cowards back and turned one to the other in moments. The cold would keep the ground hard at least, and the footing better – no sea of hungry steaming mud here – but all the same… All the same, Simra wouldn’t have bet on the other mer’s chances. Wouldn’t have taken his place. He almost asked himself, what would his price be? But he pulled the thoughts up and threw them away. There are better ways to make coin.


	40. Chapter 40

Millet danced in the pot’s round gut as it boiled. Dark grains, lustreless red and bark-brown, flecks of white; wild grains, changeling amongst the tame. It took the water slow. Then it became a froth, threatening against the pot’s curled lip. And then it was the froth, fat with heat and vanished water, old shape lost in the new.

Simra squat beside the fire, seated on his haunches. A bundle of cloth was pitched above the steaming pot, held between a forked stick and a leaning spear spiked down in the forest floor. Coarse cheap linen, fray-edged and nearly white, but colour flecked the fabric in blue and red and the rust of nosebleeds past — marks leftover from the long miscellany of its uses. Someone looms and toils for as long as it takes to make cloth, Simra reckoned the least you could do is not waste their work. Let its life be long and varied, til variety makes of it rags and ravels.

The dusk was half down already. Noor walked through the half-starved shortgrass. Leafmulch leftover from Autumn sucked and noised under her soft shoes. Noor sang as she went, breathy and low, in a voice like a breeze feeding scraps of itself to a fire.

Time enough, Simra decided. The cloth had sweat clean in the heat and the steam. Simra took it down. Nearby, a broad and flattish stone, like all the crags and rockspurs here, pinkbrown and pitted and porous. Simra lay the cloth out on it, then returned to the pot. It was almost scalding as he gripped it, filling his nose and throat with the black smell of bronze. Anyone else’s palms and it might have burnt, but against Simra’s scarred and callused skin it stopped just short of pain, like the heat of a bath just before it becomes bearable. He poured it out over the cloth.

“Famine food,” he grunted. His stomach growled all the same. “This isn’t a harvest. If more than a third of this came from field or barn or granary, then I’m a wolfcub’s wetnurse…” A snort that was almost laughter. “Dunno the last time a soldier said to me ‘foraging’ and meant what the word fucking means. This might be a fucking first…”

The millet porridge lay steaming as it spread, a thick puddle across the cloth. Bumps and seams at first, but they evened with time and turned to nothing. Slurry and motley, the colours of brush and birch and heather.

“The bounty of waste and hedgerow,” Simra said, “ditch and moor and whatever else those Black Lamps combed over for this…”

“What now?” Tammunei asked, sitting in the yurt’s nearby mouth. They’d been watching all this while, fire showing dim in their auburn eyes as they stared out one side of their face — the same bored fascination Simra had known otherwise only in the blank broad features of cats.

“Now you wait,” he said. “Looks like a spill now, but as it cools it’s almost like a cake. A big bland nothing of cake. I swear, millet’s the only thing you have to salt before it’ll even start tasting of itself.”

“Toast it first,” said Tammunei. “In the pot without water, before the water.”

Simra’s brow creased as the corners of his mouth curled up. “Well it’s too late for that now, but…”

“I just know,” Tammunei answered the question before he could ask it.

“I’ll try it next time.” Simra exhaled, rough and empty. “In truth, anything that’ll wring a scrap more flavour from this is welcome. Got days of it ahead, might as well make it bearable.”

“It’s all we’ve got?” said Noor.

The circle she’d walked broke inward, and she came into the firelight. No stars overhead. Just a hollow of birches and nameless bluish-barked trees, looking down and missing the leaves they’d lost. Noor had stolen the lights from the sky before the moons could wake them, and the moons were hid now too. Them and us, Simra thought. Her spell was done.

“You see me buy anything else from that slackjowl back in the camp?” Simra said. “Unless you’ve got more of that drymeat hidden under your saddle, yeah it’s all we’ve got. Reckon you can bear that?”

“Over a time short or long enough, anything’s bearable.” Her face was a mask, stiff and flat but for her old-blood eyes. “How long?”

“Three days to Davon’s watch at a ride. That’s my guess anyway. That’s a pound-and-some of millet a day, and anything else you can find… This is tonight and tomorrow.” Simra nodded at the cloth of cooling porridge. “Thrilling, of course.”

Noor sighed as she settled down near Tammunei into a straightbacked kneel. “It’ll have to do.”

“That’s the spirit,” Simra said, flat.

A day’s travel out from Senie and all of it through lands picked bare. Tame lands, orchards, terrace-farms, gleaned and gone wild in the wake of this small backwater war. Fruit trees stood like standing stones, their arms pulled off to feed cookfires and charcoal pits. Fields lay chawed and ruined, some of their harvests taken, but the rest stamped down and rotting beneath days of fall-and-thawing snow. The road itself they rode down was half-spoiled by those who’d ridden and walked it before. Lifeless country was hard to live from. Even the wild birds, the scrib, the burrowers and beasts had left and were yet to come back. Either that or they were hiding.

The way they’d come had passed from fields and terrace-tiered valleys and into close land, covetous of itself, and secretive. Bad country to march an army through, Simra thought; worse still to ride through, a small band of strangers. Loose woods where the pocked and troughed road wound between stands of trees, small families of shrubs, none agreeing with one another enough to band together into anything you’d call a forest. In the coves and overgrowth, they lost track of the distance, the mountains, the road ahead or behind. Between the bare outreaching branches, the sky was cut in pieces — potshards painted blue and scattered far and wide.

That was the land they camped in now. Leaf-fall, spars of dim pink stone like bones seen through the lean land’s starving skin, and bitter stunted trees. One lurched up in twists and knots from near where the yurt was pitched. Cords and lines of wood made up its trunk and branches — a tree put together like a rope is, woven and spooled from fainter thinner versions of itself. Old age hung thick as moss on its boughs, its ancient sleeping bole and wide-groping roots.

“You haven’t ever come this way,” said Tammunei. Another question whether it sounded asked or not.

“Not this way into the mainland, no.” Simra shuffled to the yurt’s mouth and under its awning. They were close enough together now to brush elbows, hold a conversation in whispers. Close enough that Simra could busy himself; talk without looking at them. “The plains for a while, and further south. Narsis and the swamps below it. Think I looked and saw Argonia once, down in the distance. But never the East. Or, well, never east enough that there just…weren’t birds anymore, you know? Not a single thing with fur.”

“But you know a lot about the Temple,” said Tammunei. “That is, you have a lot to say about them. The Indoril.”

Why? That was what they meant. How? Simra’s thoughts shuddered, kicked up a new course, and began to race. What had he already said, and to who? Familiar, this sudden half-scared speed. Like walking in the Rigs and finding of a sudden you’re followed, finding of a sudden your feet aren’t walking but slapping on wood, scuffling on scaffolds, and you’re in the Gulleybottom, downgorge, fleeing fast as you can through mud before you know you’re being chased. And then you round a corner, and find your mind has failed you. Where there ought to have been an alleycourse to vanish down, there’s blind walls, a stop, and no way ahead. You think hard as screaming, and your bare feet skid in the summertime mud. You check with yourself: what do I know?; who knows what I know? No-one? Good. It was familiar.

“Told you I’d been a scrivener a few times, right?” Simra looked up. His hands had gone to his bags while his mind whirled, and there they’d busied themselves. They brought out a bobbin of fine thread, roughsilk, pinned safe with a clip of copper. Now he searched Tammunei’s face. “Well, one of the places I set up to work sitting down for a while was Suran. That’s a Temple town.”

“Oh.” Tammunei blinked like something was wrong.

“What?”

“I didn’t know that. I thought — that is, I thought I knew the name from something else. I remembered, but with different things attached. It doesn’t matter.”

Simra paused, measuring the hitch in their voice. It wasn’t so much a matter of remembering what lies he’d told. He tried not to lie to Tammunei. But there were a lot of truths, and some were best kept closer than others.

“It changed,” Noor put in. “That’s the way on Vvardenfell. Things become things they weren’t before. The sea came to Suran when it was a ruin. Then the Baelathri bel-Indoril came from the sea.”

Noor’s knowing uneased Simra worse than Tammunei’s questions. “Right,” he said, quick, smiling. “Point is, I spent long enough there. Long enough scribing prayers for those that couldn’t write so they could go off shrineward and burn my pretty letters to ashes. Not that my Dunmeris script was worth much for prettiness back then, but allwise it was practice. Better than anything they could do, anycase. But my point is, I picked up some opinions before leaving.”

Cold and ear-aching air. A presiding pause. Tammunei’s head had bowed as Simra spoke and their eyes had closed. Small grey hands with coarse pink palms; Tammunei was tangling a lock of their hair. It would’ve been a braid but the strands kept losing their way, not waiting their turn, tying each over the other. Time was, years back, when Simra might’ve let them finish the mess they were making just to give them both an excuse. To give Tammunei a reason to sit between his knees a while as his fingers untied the knots, one by one; combed out the red thatch of it and said, I’m sorry I can’t braid them again, just unmake them… Now Simra just watched, and hoped the hair wouldn’t mat so bad as it might.

Tammunei was cross-eyed over the length of hair in their fingers. “But what did they do to you?” they asked, without looking up.

Simra’s face clenched, then slack into laughlines and squinting laughing eyes. “Do to me?” He rasped.

“You hate them. What did they do to earn it?”

“Ghosts and bones, I don’t hate them!” Simra kissed his teeth, fidgeted his white fingers against the heel of his palm. The nail of the pointer finger dug a little; the other three stayed short, never grew. “House Indoril never did bad by me. Never did a thing to me but gave me work, a trade to learn, and coin for the doing of it. Books to borrow…”

“Then it’s either what they’ve done to others, or what they are themselves…” said Noor.

“Hmn.” Simra grunted. “Reckon it must be.”

His smile had faded; his laughter gone to silence. His attention went insistent back to the bobbin of thread. He unwound a double handslength; held the spool in his left hand, the end in his right, and went to the flat stone, the sheet of linen, the millet, cooked and cooled and set now. His back was to the others. Face a hidden stormcloud, hands working, thread taut between them. He used it like a wire, slicing the cake of millet into fingers and inches. Like inking the rules onto a new leaf in a ledger — tabulating the blank space into boxes and columns, the streets and houses and rooms of the mind. He chewed on his lower lip, concentrating; felt the scar there, stiff as gristle. And then he shuffled aside to let the others see.

“Doesn’t look like much?” His tone was bright again, talking them fast away from where they’d last been. “Well it isn’t. Less you’ve got fatback for our skillet in which case, fried up, it’s pure poor man’s pleasure, but…we don’t. Still got its uses though. Knew a girl in Windhelm, hair only a shade distant from yours, Tammu. She swore she had an old aunt who did the same with oaten porridge or barley. Said she’d make too much every morning by design, because her way was that she had this drawer in this old seachest. She’d crack open that drawer, pour the rest of the pot out and in. In with the dust and the dead spiders and all. That worked like flour for kneading bread, right? Stopped the porridge sticking. Then she’d leave it with the shadows to get cold. And then when she was hungry? She’d open it up again and just cut herself a slice.”

Disgust glanced across Noor’s face. Tammunei’s disgust looked more like concern.

“…Nords,” Simra finished, half-lame.

“We don’t have a drawer,” Tammunei said. “We’re not doing that.”

“Too right we’re fucking not, thanks be.”

Simra shuffled round till he faced the fire. Its flames were all but dead now. Only cracked drywood, white and fissured with black, and the longer sticks and branches looking like clean-scorched bones. Half-eaten fuel grey-banked with hot cinders. He lay the small bricks of cold millet in the belly of his pot again and stamped it down into the ashes to nestle there.

“We bake them,” he said. “By morning they’re crisped up, dry, and you can fill your feedsacks. Biscuits. Travel food.”

“And tonight?” Noor asked.

Simra grunted and nodded his head to the cloth, still lain out on the flat stone. Three handlengths of cold and cut millet, dapple-coloured with sides sharp and regular where the thread had cut, but the upmost face whorled and wrinkled. Like firestone gone to liquid and cooled; the new floor of a filled in foyada. Like glass, wept long ago from the leadframing of a window, a lake now of grimy unmelting ice. Vvardenfell, Simra thought and then stopped thinking.

“Doesn’t look like much?” he said. “It isn’t.”

He picked up his ingot of millet. A hasty motion but dainty-held between his fingertips. He took a bite and it tasted of nothing. Only the faint thirst-shadow of salt.

“Does the baking make it taste better?” said Tammunei, eating, swallowing.

“No. Just makes it keep.”

Tammunei gave a small hum and finished their share.

“Such bounty,” said Noor. “Should we thank the ancestors do you think?”

Simra kissed his teeth. “You want bounty, hunt for it. Only don’t fall behind.”

Noor’s curt laugh smoked in the air.

A snow began to fall. Thick and shapeless flakes, wet and then melting to water as soon as they touched skin, cloth, ground. What was left of the fire sizzled and spat, fighting the damp. Snow steamed from the pot as Simra fixed a flap of hide over its mouth, tying it with twine. A pilgrim’s oven, he’d heard it called: ashes, iron, and leather.

Perhaps it was Skyrim still clinging to him, colouring his mind as the cost it asked for raising him, but in Winter a feeling came over him: that it had always been Winter, or at least more often than not. In his memories, and in the stories he told, and in this falling night. Failing snow and senseless feet and aching humming ears.


	41. Chapter 41

_I go hounded through the glassgarden. Hungers hunts me; snaps at the haggardown heels of my boots. The plants here have gone untended, untame; flourished on their newfound wildness and the rain that cracks down on them through the broken panes of roof. Between every stand of overgrowth, the shadows are thick with scent though. The steam of simmering broth and sizzle of fat. Meals gone by and the smoke of a meal in the making._

_Torture._

_I duck under the eaves of a tree. It’s twisted, strange, not knowing what to do with its own size. Like it was clipped and pruned to stay small. But this one’s branches and trunk are outgrown, sprawling, grown huge and grown over with shoals of climbing vine—_

_Fuck it. No. Who writes this way? Who’d read and believe? Sit too close to the truth, it’ll burn you. Stories’re told the way they are for the sake of distance, framing. Make the real unreal enough to be bearable, believable. No one needs the inside of your head, Simra. The raw unvarnished matter of it? Fuck. Note this — Do what you do. Spin a story and scratch the above. Rewrite when you’ve got the time._

_It was warmer in the glassgarden and I went hounded through. Hunger hunted me; snapped at the haggardown heels of my boots. Riftboots, riding-boots, ill-fitted to walking; standheeled to keep fair hold on a stirrup, and clicking on the stone flag floor._

_Close the air around me, moist and muffling sound. Still I heard the carry of voices. Adrift and distorted, they reached me like the scent of their cooking. In snatches, in stirrings of gut and stammering heart. Sizzle of fat and the lingering muttony lure of meals roast days back, weeks back, clinging to the shadows and the soft wet air._

_Torture._

_The plants here had gone untended, untame. Wild for a century and some they’d sprawled and put out seed; bred and flourished in their newfound freedom. Fed on the rain that cracked down on them through the broken panes of roof above._

_I ducked under the eaves of a tree. Twisted, strange, not knowing what to do with its own size. I’ve heard of such trees since – seen them in rich houses – clipped and pruned daily to stay their size so they grow in nothing but age. Surgeoned into ornaments. But this one had forgot the knife, the shears, the saw. Its trunk bulged and writhed and its branches eeled outward. Its arms clamoured up through the glassgarden roof to claw greedy after the sun. It had starved to death. Still, in its way, it lived: climbing vines hugged over its greyblack bark and fungus formed on its trunk like the scales on a fish, all grown one way in frills the colour of boiled pork._

_By then I heard voices. Dunmeris, heavy accents, dialect unfathomable as music to me back then, or birdsong. They murmured, groggy and lazy — the satisfaction of those about to be sated. I took the wand from my boot and slipped it a little up and into the rags that wrapped my tunic sleeves, hidden in the long belled arms of my coat. Walked closer, stooping and close to silent._

_Through a trellis screened in fork-leaved creepers I saw them. Four and a fire sided with stones, black from long use. Bedrolls and boxes, a heavy curtain of sailcloth slung over an eave in the roof. A wall of glass, lead-seamed, soot-smeared, looking out onto the city below. Easy to forget in this overgrown place that we were so high up — a roofgarden, skied with glass and sunk into a buildingtop like some half-lush vale or basin._

_I waited. Watched. Their talk hastened. And then, like flames rise quick as a bird from smoke and stirrings in drywood, their talk changed._

_“Ey skulk. Hind that wall. You, skulker!”_

_They had clipped into a broader Dunmeris, meaning to be understood. And understand that as they chose words for my benefit, so I choose theirs for you, translating the grind and chop of their speech into a Tamrielic that reflects it._

_“Yeah you, skulk. Think we ain’t know you there?” A coarse voice, male-toned, weighty. “Tchaww! Thinks we ain’t know…”_

_“Shah… Come out on over, skulk.” Another voice and softer, coaxing. “We ain’t hurt you. Swear it onna ghosts. How’s that?”_

_Something wheezed over their words. A sound like stifled laughter. And choice had me stilled in its teeth. Flee or stray in closer._

_“It’s bad people won’t share a fire in badlands and badtimes, skulk… Come you over. Got fire for you. Meat too if we like your look. A stew cooking.”_

_One muttered something in dialect, low and hurried. Another reached slow to their belt._

_“Unless you’re bad people, yourself, ey? Tell it, skulk — are you?”_

_I felt the wand in my sleeve, secret and ready to slip free and into my fingers. I tried that thought on for solace, safety, and found it more than half hollow._

_“I’ll come out…” My voice but thin and choked._

_Heartbeat hot as thunder in my ears and throat and itching palms, but my hunger weighed them out. Days of it; a weight of weakness through me. I’d be little use for a fight, and shortwinded if I chose to flee. I found my way to the trellis end; stepped round and into sight._

_They sat on boxes and chests. Lay on stuffed sacks like horkers at bay._

_One stood and stared. Thumbs through his belt, scalp badly shaved, knife-kissed in scraps of pink and scab. A powerful build on that one but no weapons I could see._

_Halfway behind him, another with tumbles of dust-coloured hair. A stocky shawlish scarf around his skinny shoulders and a slack grin glinting out his dish-round face._

_There was another, skin palegrey and eyes manshaped, with a short and bunchedback tail of yellow hair. He was the one with the knife in his belt. A sheer slim filleting blade with an upticked point, and his fingers danced on its handle._

_The woman among them was soft, big-middled, and dressed in a thick and napclothed gown, red as rust. Her head was shaven too, but neat-cut, down to velvet._

_Between them all, a pot of something steamed._

_“Only a grub…” the woman crooned. Hers was the softer voice. “Youngun, see.”_

_“Might be he is,” said the big mer, stubble and scab-headed. “He come dressed inna question though. That’s what I see…”_

_“I’m sorry,” I said. Not hard to play frail and threatless when I felt so much to be both. “I’m lost is all.”_

_The halfmer with the yellow hair and the knife gave a snort. “Must be. A goodlander in Old Ebonheart. I’d say you’re lost as shit.”_

_Roundface shuddered and shook his head, fitful, huddling neck and chin down into his shawl with eyes knit closed. His skin was hearthdust grey, bloodless and wan._

_I took a step forward, towards the warm of their fire. Felt its heat on my empty palms as I truced them out before me. “Sounds about right.” I tried to smile._

_“Come you over.” The woman slapped a box next to her with a thick hand. She looked to Scabhead with asking eyes and he gave back a stunted nod. “We got plenty. Badlands ain’t so bad to us, ey? Look hungry. Are you?”_

_My nod was quicker, desperate. I remembered the pass in the mountains and the voices I heard from above. Not much more than a strip of a boy, they’d said. A lost little lamb. Toll’s off, little lamb. Eyes up. Siska, Vesh, Kjeld — they took me in for Winter when at first they’d thought to rob me. A testament to my inborn charm, or maybe even the goodness of people. Can’t be that everyone who homes in wild places means to hurt those passing through… I sat. My gut growled on cue._

_“Not much longer then,” said the woman, stirring the squat black pot that steamed between them._

_I craned for a look inside. A rich plush red in colour, bubbling gentle. Pale meat and pink knuckles of yam showed as she stirred. The scent was spiced, fermented. Preshta-jan and hot pepper._

_“How long’s it you been inna city then?” Scabhead pressed me, frowning across the cookfire._

_“A week?” I guessed. “Two at the most.”_

_“You ain’t know?”_

_“Not for certain. Things got confused. I was hurt…” Am hurt, I almost said. “Might’ve lost a day or two.”_

_“And where before that?”_

_“Off the plains. From the west.”_

_“The West,” grunted Scabhead. “That’s clear.”_

_What was that supposed to mean? I bit my tongue, knowing the answer. Outlander, emmigrant, revenant. Tongue lost and only half found._

_“One of those then, hm?” said the halfmer. “Them that came through.”_

_“The caravan, yeah…” It hitched in my heart. I’d tried not to think backwards; tried not to give myself leave. Tammunei would stick in my throat if I did. Shurfa and Balambal and the rest would hang corpse-heavy round my neck. “You knew about them?”_

_“Was the talk of the tongs for a while, goodlander. Course we knew!”_

_The woman rag-wrapped her hands and hauled the pot off from over the fire to sit it on the seal-black floorstones, amongst the dust and the stickiness of past cooking. Strong shoulders, I noted; she lifted from the knees scarce at all. She placed a black iron breadpan on the dying heat and turned to a cloth-covered basket. Hungry as I was, I could smell starch, the bland satisfaction of rice…_

_“The tongs..?” I asked._

_“Shah…” hushed the woman. “Greener than good good glass, this one!”_

_“Families…” Roundface stammered out._

_“Gangs, houses…” said Scabhead. “Them hereabouts. Ebonhearters. Badlanders. People like us.”_

_“You too,” said the woman. “Now.”_

_She set a pat of rendered fat onto the pan. My guts twisted as I watched it melt. Watched her shape wet cooked rice with her hands. Grey mulch, smelling of salt as she worked it into stout little cakes and slapped them onto the hot black breadpan._

_“That’s if you stay,” said the halfmer. “Live long enough. What split you off from them in the caravan anyway?”_

_The line of my lips thinned. I made a show of shrugging. “I like living. They were headed north, not knowing a blighted thing about where they were going or where they could stop, shelter. And with Winter coming? Fuck that. I’m Skyrim born. I know better.”_

_“Pshaw. Tell yourself that why ain’t you.” Scabhead brought out bowls from a cloth-packed box. “Thinks I that if you knew better you’d’ve split off long before. Stopped before the badlands.”_

_“Split…” Moonface blinked hard and shuddered again beneath his heavy roughcloth shawl._

_“There’s shelter here,” I said. “Fuel to burn. And it doesn’t look like you’re lacking for food. I’ll stay put.”_

_Bowls and ladles and steaming stew. The first bowl went to the woman. After the others were served she passed me the last of the bowls. A stew of meat and yams – grown here, I wondered?; beneath the glass roof? – with a golden-black saltrice panbread half sunk in its red broth. A hunger came over me, so strong it felt like sickness. I hesitated, waiting for someone else to start._

_“Eat,” Scabhead said. “Wouldn’t share if we couldn’t.”_

_No holding back after that. I wolfed the bowl. Burnt my tongue. Meat something like tender pork. I felt it catch between my teeth and worked it with my tongue long after the bowl was empty._

_“We’re met then,” said Scabhead. “Host and guest. So, question. That coat…” He licked his lips. “I know that coat. How come you by it?”_

_I looked over at Roundface. Bowl between his knees, leaning down like a twisted tree over it, he steadied it with the stump of an arm come out from under his shawl. It was off at the elbow. With his remaining hand he mopped stew into his mouth with a sop of panbread. Broth ran down his shallow chin._

_The food sat strange in me of a sudden. I hadn’t eaten so much or so richly in so long. It clouded my head like drink or the soonness of sleep._

_“Asked you a question… Guls’s, ain’t it? Him of the Eggfarmers. They gone now?”_

_“I don’t…don’t know what you’re talking about. Found it’s all…”_

_The woman went over to Roundface and knelt by him. His mouth was trying slack to smile but a wetness had grown in his eyes. Her lips were moving; talking out something rhythmic._

_And then my eyes were caught and I couldn’t look away. The stump that ended Roundface’s arm had begun to shift, crawl, things at work under the skin. Bloodless and strange, something broke through the layer of cauterised flesh. Bones, I thought at first. But they were fingernails, child-small and sharp, pink as coral._

_The woman was chanting, slow and soft as crooning to a baby, as she rubbed Roundface’s back and shoulders. The others picked up the chant. And the halfmer poured a ladleful of stew red onto the coals. It stank of iron and bile and my gorge rose. It was dialect again; words not meant for my understanding. But of the words I caught, I heard words that might have meant sacrament, and gift. Last of all I heard a name, spoken in love and thanks._

_Namira._

_The sailcloth curtain rippled, pulled at itself. A curdled scream came from behind it. I felt it echo in my head like my own but my voice wouldn’t come. Like in night terrors when fear is a choking silence. The taste of retching, metallic on my tongue, I scrambled up and ran, blind and fast, thinking of nothing but to empty my stomach of the flesh I’d eaten._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shouts out to Tarhiel for their work as a beta reader for this chapter. Invaluable and amusing. If you're not already reading their fic, 'How To Disappear Completely,' more fool you. It's great. Go read.


	42. Chapter 42

_When I ran from the people-eaters in the glassgarden, I had no sense where I was running. Away, to quiet, to solitude. Guts eeling inside me, but I felt eyes from everywhere though I saw no faces, no living souls. Only the shade of a racer or two, hanging above on open motionless wings, too high to see if they saw me. Still it felt like accusal._

_I found my way across rooftops of rough-faced clay and into a deep gutter between one building and the next. Overhead the noonday sun in a white and grainy sky, but to either side of me only the shoulder-high guttersides. I was hidden. I threw up in gagged silence. Made myself retch long after my belly was empty of all but bile._

_The feeling had me entire, then, body and brain and all. That I needed to be rid of what I’d eaten — what I told myself they’d made me eat. And I told myself I couldn’t have known better. Still I felt I should’ve had some sense: a wrongness, even before it all came clear. But all I’d thought of was my hunger, and the savour of stew and spices. And perhaps the hope that this was other than as cursed a place as it seemed. That maybe there was kindness here, and community. Something like civilisation, or at least settlement, in seed if not in shoot and stem._

_I looked at the red mess I’d left in all my retching, though. And some beast and bird part of me still spoke up and said: Waste. It had passed teeth and tongue and throat and known the inside of me. What difference did it really make if I threw it back out after? It had touched me. Was I changed? I was still hungry. Worse even than before. That dark part of me wanted to take it back. It wanted not to have run._

_The gutter sloped down a little. All this while I had grit my boots against its sides for purchase. Saltlick stains from rains gone by marked its coarse-tiled channel. Detritus too. Drowned half-rotted racer plumes and scraps of draggled cloth. Twigs unthatched from nests, I supposed, and the small bones of things that had lived and died in these rooftops. But I looked down the way it flowed and saw it fed down into an alley. One of the narrow ratways that made up the understory of Dyer’s End. Black iron staples laddered down the side of the fall._

_I followed the gutter’s flow down, and down into the alley, the underbelly, where I searched in the shadows and overhang of Dyer’s End, hungry and hollow as a ghost._

_In the days that followed I found glints of luck at the roots and in the branches of that forest of stone, claybrick, crumbling plaster._

_Scorching open the rot-warped wood of a cellar hatch, I got inside and set fox-mad among the dusty jars and shelves collapsed long ago from damp. Up in the shop above, a weaver’s, where the cloth had gone to mould and tatters. But below I found a jar of black gram, and another of dried fruitpeel, rich dark halves of dried apricot, a pair of laminate bracers in resin the blue-black glistering colour of wet ink. I gorged myself on the food; strapped on the armour. I had no aketon now, no sword, and any protection was better than none._

_Just as well, I found. That day I ducked into a scragged thorny patch of overgrowth to hide as I heard voices. It covered half a square I’d found in the Dyer’s End underbelly, where I knew the old well with its green copper bucket still gave good water. I lay on my belly, knife in one hand, wand in the other. And through the brush I dared a few small glimpses of the mer who came to draw from the well, same as I had._

_They were each of them lean and bandy built, but bundled and draped in fabrics. Long shawls, belted at their waists with sashes of faded silk in the blue and green of the ocean, the rabbit’s blood red of black tea. Spurs jutted out from the toes of their low and manytime-mended boots, I reckoned to help them climb. Clever. One wore their hair long and off-black down their back in a tail bunched with ties of fabric every handslength down. The other was Bosmer, with earthenware skin and bugshell-black eyes, and wore a fringed turban wound about his head, a small ragpack on his back. He carried a sickle – the Morrowind rice-farmer’s sort; a shaft and slight-curved blade like a carrionbird’s beak where a hatchet would have its head – while the other had a soot-blacked shortsword, and dishlike buckler hooked to their belt._

_They spoke a dialect thinner than the eaters in the glassgarden. Sometimes a turn would come that I couldn’t follow, or else that seemed strange, too far from literal for me to work out. But I caught the greater part of their talking._

_Would they have enough, they wondered? Enough for the Lord of the Stilts. Six strides of roughcloth and two of fine. A gull nest; the soupmaking sort. A knife. Fine if you clean off the rust. And the books? Depends what’s in them — might be worth a cup or two, but then again maybe not. It would be enough – so ran their verdict – but not enough for much._

_I was left wondering: Much of what?_

_They turned away and down an alley. The pack on the Bosmer’s back began to squall. It was a baby. What did that omen? That there was hope to be had here? Or only that there was a place more pitiable to be born and be a child than the Grey Quarter of Windhelm?_

_Next day, I hungered again. I tried to keep from working magic, for fear it would render what meat there was still left on my bones faster than going half-starved. Something will always be eaten. Those were my mother’s words, and perhaps they held with more than just calling fire. So I went unwashed. I suffered the dark after close of day. But when I needed fire – to boil gram, or to light the spitting stinking pine-pitch torch I used to see by while searching buried places – the sparks to kindle the flame I needed came always from inside me. I didn’t know how to make fire with flint and steel or rubbing wood. I had never needed to before. To this day I still haven’t learnt._

_Read and understand, I was no great worker of spells in those days. I could call a dim bleak light to see by. Could ask fire from things that would burn; call smoke and heat from air and stone; and shape and strengthen what other flames I found extant. I knew cantrips I’d bought on scraps of paper for coppers from witches in tents in sellsword camps — to clean myself and ask water if it were clean to drink. And, over two weeks, I had muttered and chanted, dry-mouthed, a mantra that perhaps hastened the heal of my wounded side, or at least had dulled the pain from it._

_I’ve since learnt healing charms, purgations, and bindings from the libraries of the Indoril. I’ve worked in a siege-choir with a dozen other battlemages to call fire from the sky to sunder walls and topple towers. I’ve learnt wards to weave the air and turn arrows of iron and steel from their flight. I’ve studied the rites of the Temple to name and weigh and rest the dead. And more than that, I’ve turned my ken to harsher arts than would be lawful to admit to or explain here._

_But even then, going without magic day after day felt like a dimness at the heart of me. Like I lacked more and more of what before had been bright and keen and clever in me, and was living beastlike and so becoming a beast. And as I killed a rat with a thrown roofslate and was thankful to the point of glee for the spitted meat, it was easy to believe that what I felt and feared was true._

_I’d not eaten rat since the Winter of my fourteenth year. A sickness had come over the Quarter. Rockjoint. My father had it and it kept him from work, and kept food from our bowls and fuel from our hearth. My mother, my sister, my father and I — we almost froze and almost starved. And when Soraya was quick enough to catch rat, or cat, from the Rigs or the Gulleybottom of the Quarter, we were grateful and hateful for what had become of us. But we had one another. Who did I have now? The growing savage self I hid from, and the voices and footsteps and strangers’ shapes. I hid from them as well._


	43. Chapter 43

When they came to the rivermouth the water lay low on its banks. Wide and widening towards the strait where it let out into the sea, the river was spread too thin over too much bed. Long ago smoothed by the river in high-flowing months and years of springmelt, rocks stumped up from the ground, dry now. Fallen weeds and stranded reeds, silver with frost. And what of the river still ran was skinned with a sheen of ice. A veinwork of currents, ankle-deep, travelled sunbright towards the sea.

“Ought to mean we’re halfway,” said Simra.

He leaned on his spear, both hands gripped high on its shaft just below the hook that spurred back from its head, and hunched with elbows crooked towards the river. If you could call it that anymore. He wouldn’t if it weren’t on his map.

“To Davon’s Watch?” said Noor.

She still rode her guar, albeit at a walk. Vereansu pride; why walk when you can ride. They’d spent two days in the woods and coves in ground too rough to ride through. She was making up for lost time now and it bothered Simra. The deepening cold was cruel on the guar, and Tammunei and Simra reined theirs along on foot to rest it. It carried only their packs. The slackening sack of millet; the skillet hitched to its empty and arse-worn saddle.

“Mhm.” She was about to complain, Simra reckoned — didn’t take a seer to say so. He pre-empted her. “Before you say a fucking thing, yes it’s slower going than I said before.” His teeth barely parted to speak and they grit again straight after.

“Three days already,” she said.

“This is the third,” he corrected. “You wanna thunder on ahead alone? Lame your guar into the bargain? Just as well throw twenty drams down the first ditch you find — only buyer’ll buy him in Davon’s Watch after that’s the butcher. Or the knacker.”

Her face stiffened. Steam from her nostrils as she let out a huff. Chastened though, Simra reckoned. If half of Vereansu pride’s in their riding beasts, worst thing you can do is threaten to waste one.

“Nothing?” Simra cocked his head at Noor. “No further contentions to shove at me? Good. Glad we’re of a mind.”

The wind struck up whistling and stung at Simra’s ears. Grease them, his mother would’ve said, else they’ll snap straight off. She’d have shelled out on pork or mutton for that very purpose. Whatever seemed better marbled at the Gulleybottom market; more likely pig after Redrunsday, and cuts of heart and black pudding, going cheap before they soured. Cooking them, she’d render out what fat she could to rub her children’s eartips. You smell like a bad candle, Soraya would say after.

Around them the land was heady, rolling, trapped with ditches and gullies half-hidden in yellow and red heather. Streaks of snow bright amongst the scrub. Stones and spars of rock, starting to look like seacliffs, but no gulls any more to shriek — not so far east. Mountains rose to right of where they stood, days away in the distance and bleak already with snow. The rivermouth began to yawn if you looked off to northward, a growing confusion of stillwater and sea.

“Cross?” Simra jutted his chin at the shallow river. “Nice not to have to ford or ferry over for fucking once.”

His mood was sour by then. He forced sunshine into his voice, hoping to drive it off, repair the bitterness built up between he and Noor. Wouldn’t do to sour her towards him worse than he needed to. Wouldn’t do to have nothing tying her here but debt — and Tammunei, he supposed, but what if she took them with her? What then? Simra thought of the rattling pouch in his gathersack, useless without someone who could use it, and sure as snow he couldn’t.

“I didn’t know we were going to sell them,” said Tammunei. No sorrow in the words. Not quite. Only a strange weighted surprise.

“Well we can’t ride them over the Inner Sea…” Simra answered, careful. He might have said more – unless you’ve got some better idea as to how we can afford to take ship then I’d love to hear it, but no, of course you don’t because who else thinks this shit through but me? – but he held his tongue.

“We’ll leave them with the right person then. Someone who’ll ride them,” Tammunei said. “Feed them.”

Simra pointed a glance at Noor, over a hunched shoulder and the tall line of his knotwooded spearshaft. “If I can.” Not a hard thing to almost-promise. Selling them as riding guar would bring back a better price than selling them as meat or leather and bones. But a riding guar has to be ridable.

Tammunei joined their look to his, but blunter, harder. A slow persistence of pressure, like the dropstone lid on a jar of preshta-lo, crushing by patience the wet from the leaves. Vereansu pride, it seemed to say; had she any left, or was she as clanless in heart as in line and in name?

Noor’s face went hard like she was holding her breath. A leathern creak of stirrups. She dismounted. Flat shoes on the frosty ground and then she reached down to take those off too, and stood barefoot like some much-suffered saint.

Simra looked down. Fixed his gaze on his wrist. Prayer beads he’d never prayed with, in a string of clay and lacquer, red and blue and black. The copper coiled snake bracelet. Two thin rounds of etched silver, locked each into the other. The six-faced pewter ring, warm on his left middle finger. Eyes dropped like it had humbled him, or stirred up some scrap of penitence. But inside he was bitter-pleased. With himself; with Tammunei for siding with him on this small and sticking thing. So long as he had Tammunei, he had them both in hand.

 

_I had hiding places all through Dyer’s End by then. The stoved-in top of the store-tower, well out of the way, and safe and steep in peril as only high places feel, but airy and cold. The colour shop low in the depths, with its weights and scales, and its rust-screeching iron grate that covers the door. A factoring pit in a dusty and dim dyer’s workshop, where I buried myself on the wintriest nights of that closing year. The overhang between two roofs, where ill-planned buildings crowded together, its entrance hedged with weeds grown up from the silt and the ash of a gutter, and looking out and down towards the citadel’s eastern harbor and the slate-grey sea._

_In each of them I cached goods and supplies. Jars of rain- and well-water; scraps of good cloth or metal; grain and gram and the compact of saltfish I found breaking into another basement. And in each of them – whichever was nearest – I hid at the first sign of life beyond the life I was living. Runners across the rooftops or scavengers down on the streets. Quiet and careful folk who moved like hunters — with them I feared the worst, remembering the glassgarden, and the savour of meat in the pot._

_I remembered they’d asked me about the coat I wore. Known by name the one who’d worn it. The eggfarmers — gone, are they? All but one, I knew. Drosi and Guls were dead by my hand, the life burnt out from both their bodies. But of Tepa I knew nothing; not even a face to remember, let alone a fate to put to it. Tepa with their pack of nix and their hiss-clumsy voice. And each time I heard the pitchy rilk or chatter of nix in the night, I still thought: They’ve scented me out. They’re coming for me._

_That was part of the reason why I struggled to not stay put. One night in the warehouse tower, the next in the dye-pit with its purple walls and purple-dust floor and the stains that stuck to my elbows and knees til the next rain washed them off. I didn’t know then how a nix tracks prey, tasting the air and tasting the dirt. I only knew that if my passing was to leave traces, I’d best leave a mess of traces, a confusion of them. My tracks would lead nowhere but back on themselves. Or so I thought._

_Still I wondered: How long before they find me? How long before the sound or shadow I jump at turns out to deserve my fear? Not long, it turned out. I proved far better at outrunning my hunger than I did the last of the eggfarmers._

 

Past trampledown earth and underbrush scarred with the cookfires and foraging of an army on the move. Past saltwater ricepaddies clinging to the coast, to the small stilt-hut or stone-perched houses of farmers, seen from up on the way they walked. Past the rough hard-crossing country that lay inland, all pink-grey stone and the distant shapes of herders and their nix on the low sharp hills. Winding along the seacliffs, between banks of dirty-blond heather and rills of silt where the ocean rushed in at high tide, the narrow road led to Davon’s Watch.

The millet ran low after crossing the first river, but they camped the next two nights close to some beach or small rocky bay, and each time Tammunei caught dinner from the water. Pale flat sandeaters with mottled wings and squashed alien faces that hovered into Tammunei’s hands as they waded knee-wet in the shallows and came back legs glittering with salt. Sea-shalk from traps of woven twigs and flotsam, cobbled together more to keep fishcatching magic in than to catch fish themselves. Tammunei sang soft as they worked and only Simra went taskless as night set in, using the time to write. They made soups of salt and kelp and bony fish. They cooked the shalk in their shells, sucked out the bitter-rich meat, and Simra saved the chitin to sell. They fried the flatfish in red oil from Simra’s jar of preshta-jan and scraped the flesh from off the hundred fingers that skeletoned their wings.

Only the guar went hungry, got skinny. This was bad land for grazing, and what grass there’d been was burnt or champed to the roots by the army that had passed this way. Tammunei tried to feed them white soft fish, kelps from rockpools. Said they remembered Ahemmusa guar would graze from the sea just as well as from grasslands, scraping barnacles from stones with their blunt flat teeth and searching out snails and weeds at low tide. But these guar were Vereansu. They wouldn’t eat. Simra wouldn’t have thought somewhere sparse as the Deshaan Plains could leave a beast or a person spoilt but here they were all the same. Stupid animals. Probably wouldn’t fare well on a boat, even if they could pay their stabling over the Inner Sea.

Fifth day out from Senie, another deeper river struck across their path. A gorge deep enough that falling down it would likely break your legs if not kill you outright from the impact. At the bottom, rocks and coursing water, impatient to get at the ocean and kicking up a rise of freezing spray. But on the far side, a spur of land leaned down toward the sea.

Simra made out the far-off prickle of jetties and piers, shapes reaching out into the water. The far-off shows of boatsails, and flashes of paint-bright hulls. A cram of tiled roofs, parched yellow in the vacant sun, and streaked here and there with wild herbs blown as seeds from off the hills and growing up now in their gutters. Every roof sloped seaward, like a shieldwall braced for a hail of arrows — angled to cast off ashfall from Vvardenfell. And beyond the town roofs and the harbour, paddies stretched past seeing, out along the tiderace of the seal-black beach.

“Pretty,” said Simra at the hem of the gorge. The water roared below as it scrummed against the rocks. “Hadn’t expected it to be pretty.”

“So what did you expect?” Tammunei asked.

They leaned over the gorge to look down and Simra had to silence the urge to snatch them back from it. They’re older than you by who knows how much. Older and wiser in every way but the worldliest. Stop making them a child in your mind just for the sake of feeling needed.

“Nothing,” said Simra. “A name on a map, on the other side of a river. Didn’t know the river would be like this either.”

“It’s impressive,” said Noor. “Anyone with a mind to raid in from this way would have hard work ahead of them.”

Simra shrugged. “The best fortifications are those the world gives you. Why dig a moat when you can build near something like this?”

Tammunei leaned further. Closed their eyes and stretched out a hand over the drop. Again the need to steal them back from the fall. But they sat down, feet hanging into open air.

Simra almost spoke.

“Wait,” said Noor. “Something’s being given.”

“A vision?”

“A memory, I think. When the ghosts speak, you listen.”

“They’re hollow,” Tammunei said at last. A voice not quite their own. “The walls of the gorge. Passaged. At low tide the ways in are dry. Caverns combing the cliffs underneath the town. Pored and chambered like a seasponge. From the sea to the stream to the shrines below. From the sea to the stream through the stone…”

Tammunei came back to themself as the sun moved westward and past them. They stood and dusted themself down.

Simra stirred from one foot to the other and tried not to show his discomfort. But it had seemed to hurt Tammunei. This was what he’d hoped travelling with Noor – learning from her – might help prevent, and all to no end. The ghosts still knew where to find Tammunei, and Tammunei still let them in — or perhaps couldn’t keep them out.

“Tunnels under the town,” he said. “Your ghosts say anything about where we can find a bridge?”

“This way,” Tammunei said, leading off. No dream in their voice so much as the tiredness of one who has slept overlong. “Something else too. Someone, but they’re waiting. They’ll make themself heard when they’re ready.”

Hasten the day, Simra thought, bitter as salt-pickled plums.


	44. Chapter 44

Every roof in Davon’s watch squabbled out and over the next. Between them no room for stars, tonight or any other. Only struts of ageing wood, holding up an argument of gutters and run-offs, sluices and spouts.

Still, the Thief would be up there somewhere, see it or not. Up there in the east, first thing to fade out in the dawn. Simra stumbled to look skyward. Tripped on the streetstones – small and black and round, seastone-smooth, like the shells of boresnails – and all for a glance at that jostling nothing of tile and wood. He buffed against a shopfront, catching himself. A rattle of wooden windows and the shriek of a chair inside, someone standing up, sharp.

“Have a care, lackwit!” A holler from the lamplight behind the shopfront shutters.

On one staggering foot, Simra half-turned. Half-rolled his ankle in the doing of it. It was more anger at that than anything else that started him barking back. “Catch pox, fucksucker! See if I have a fuckin’ care then!” His back bumped into the wall opposite. No windows there to shout at him but he almost smashed the jar he carried against its bricks. “I won’t! Not a scrap! Watch me fucking not…”

He caught his breath. Gone, like he’d cursed longer and louder than he had the lungs for. And then he checked the jar for cracks and faults. Nothing he could make out in the halflight. And then he staggered on.

“You fucking sop! Pathetic!”

The voice from behind the shopfront echoed at his back. Pay it no mind now. If you can’t get blind-drunk on your Signing Day night when can you? Not even blind-drunk; it was the blighted streetstones made him stagger. Blighted gutter-dug streets. Dug like ditches, hacked down steep towards the middle where there ran an open channel. Sewage and offal and shadows and frost like you’d lose a boot in if you stepped wrong. Fuck that. He sidled, sidestepped, one foot on either side of the sewer for a while, then dancing along one sloped and roundstoned rundown, then hopping across to the other. Might’ve looked playful – childlike – if not for the slight sad frown he wore, deep in thought.

There was a hung moment that hunched him over, gut cramping. Hard to say what had caused it as his stomach clenched like it wanted to hurl itself empty. Instead it came out as laughter, gurgling and hacking, hilarious before he knew why. What language had he cursed the shopfront in? Patois, Dunmeris, Velothis, or a patchwork of them all? It was funny somehow, then strange and uncertain before he could remember why it had been funny in the first blighted place.

“Simra Hishkari, peddler of culture…” he muttered. “Bringin’ the world to your door. Window. Whatever the fuck. Oughtta thank me. Lessons in language. Puttin’ a new tongue in your mouth… Listen up, you might learn somethin’…”

And he was walking again, following the sound of the sea, dark and down towards the water. But Davon’s Watch was a sea of sounds all lapping and echoing over each other. Down the tight-turning maze of its streets and over its lock-edged rooftops, the sound of slapping feet, the sound of a cornerclub disgorging the last of its late-night custom, the sound of two voices – lovers, sounded like, though maybe not for much longer – striking up together like a chorus of cats. Cold thin air. A Winter night, and full of the sounds a town makes when it ought to have been abed.

Every road was an alleyway and elbow-skinning narrow. Simra thought: No way to walk down these streets, and meet someone coming the other way, and part as friends. Every corner a scrap or shuffling of feet; every encounter an ambush. The whole town dense-built, living tight, packed like saltfish in a barrel, everything always waiting to happen, or else happening now, now, now.

Every edge of every roof was hung with something or other. Bunting of dyed cloth or cut paper. Simra turned at a streetcorner, a crowsfoot crossroads where the houses and shops wedged together, all barely as wide as a sword is long. A scrap of sky showed overhead, indigo, wounded full of stars. A kind of gibbet was fixed to the brow of a building. A small streetside shrine, incense still clinging to its open dark doorway and the gloaming of lamps lit inside. The gibbet struck out into the open above. From its arm a hanging cage of lacquer that trapped a sigilled stone: the name of some saint, etched backwards, forwards, and in anagram.

Simra caught himself standing again. Not walking anymore; just staring up. Going nightblind as he looked too long into the lamplight of the crossroads, the starlight of the sky. The Lord, the Lover, the Tower. Waspnest-looking lanterns of shapeless paper, golden glown from within. Everywhere else, shallows of shadow between doorways and lampstands: islands of light.

A voice from inside the shrine murmured a path through its prayers. “Azura, lady of twilight and what might and might not be, I’m not asking much. Only let me know. Let me be certain…”

It didn’t feel like something that ought to be heard by anyone but Azura. Might be that was enough already to draw down curses. Simra spat to ward against them, like the Nords do. His mouth was dry, the hawk of his throat and tongue thick and oversweet with thirst. He hurried away.

It only grew tighter towards the docks. The buildings were older, made from cut stone, dark pink as dusk, and they crowded closer, squat lower. The buildings rose as you went inland, like terrace fields tier up a hillside. Sometimes even the sharp-crowned tower of some presuming merchant, stricken towards the sky. But the opposite held too. Davon’s Watch crouched low as it bent towards the water. One stooped storey of stone under a tile roof, and a dug-out basement beneath. Elf-holes, Gitur would’ve said, and Simra would’ve found it hard to disagree.

One last long tunnel of street and the waterfront burst wide before Simra, a sudden blinding openness of water and shapes and sound. Creak of rigging and swollen timber, salt searching into the grain. Campfires and skyward sparks, and sailors ashore for the night tented round them. A laplyre mourned over it all, its music giving things an air of theatre: black shadows posed in the ruddy gold light.

Simra picked a way along the harbour, swaying between one fire and the next.

“Hey! Hey, cold night to be out alone!”

A voice from beside one fire picked up after him. Other voices joined the cry.

“Come, share a fire!”

“Share a tent! Before the Temple comes and makes it a crime!”

Simra tensed, drew his shoulders high and tight. Carried on.

“Too good for us, hey?”

“Thinks he’s too good to stop.”

“Nothing that way but sand and crabs, pretty! Keep walking and you might get nipped!”

“Keep on shouting,” Simra snapped back, “and you might spend the next week shitting out your teeth and my bootleather!”

He’d half-turned before he knew it – called out louder than he’d thought to – a broken spin on a heel as he stepped. Icy gut and halting heart, his eyes raced to check the distance between the voices, the shadows, the sailors and him. You’ve landed yourself in the shit now, Simra; only question’s how deep?

“That a threat?” One of them stood now, defiant. “That a threat, you skinny streak of piss?”

Funny how quick men like that go from sweet nothings to spitting venom and rankling for a fight. Funny how he could hear Soraya’s response, down the years: fuck d’you mean, ‘men like that’?; just men; it’s just men. Funny, the moment of clarity that comes before fear takes full hold. But it wasn’t fear that spoke for Simra. It was the sujamma.

“Fuck’s it sound like? Come on then — your teeth, my boot, come take a fucking bite, sweetheart!” Under his mantle, Simra’s hand twitched toward his wand. It was there, metal warm between the layers of his shirts.

A crewmate reached up, tugging at the other mer’s sleeve, saying something Simra couldn’t hear. But he heard the reply. The gist of it. Enough.

“Fuckin’ right he’s not worth it, but you heard him. I oughtta bend him over just for talking back…”

And then he was back at Gelan-Telai, in the marsh heat, in the bloodreek, the smell of smoke so familiar now he could could confuse it for clean air. Biting insects on skin that felt like wax ready to melt. Back at Gelan-Telai with the walls and siegeworks in sight, on the day the onager broke. Wound up to fire, all its sinews twisted tight, with the kick of four hundred horses knotted into that mangle of fibers. And maybe it was the heat or the damp or the simple wear of overwork as it tried overtime to breach the fort walls. But it happened in front of Simra’s eyes. One sinew frayed through, then the next gave way, then the next. Then all of them. And the great throwing arm of it charged over itself. The frame leapt and buckled and lunged splintering onto its side. The scream of one of  the engine-tenders, trapped under its bulk. The silence that reined through the whole rest of the camp before the clamour started. The marsh heat too hot to sleep in. The impatience and panic of watching the walls for a fault or a crack and all that would mean. Everything, all of them, wound up, raring.

It was like that now. Something snapped in Simra and the rest hurled all into motion.


	45. Chapter 45

When Simra woke in darkness, the world was touch and taste, and the drip and the drip and the drip that took up the whole of his hearing. The sour parch of his mouth and the overgrown ache of his head, like a fluid weight behind his darkblind eyes. The grazed gritty sting of his hands and the uncovered cold of his body. But what he noted first was the cuffs.

They were heavy on his wrists: chafing where once there’d been bracelets, bangles, beads, and leaden silence where their whisper and jangle had been. A quiet that rung out through him, into him, like swallowing a shard of ice and feeling it slip down. He fumbled with his fingers at them. Thick iron, rough to the touch, grooved and scratched. Manacles, but they weren’t chained together. Another purpose then. And Simra reckoned he already knew, but he tried all the same.

He tried to cast a light. Cupped hands near his face and metal murmuring cold close to his painful jaw, the stinging side of his cheek. He tried again and his hands were shaking, making the manacles rub. The magic wouldn’t come, when all but all his life it had come whenever he called. No light. And the dark bore down on him after that with all the weight of water.

A trapped fox frenzy then. Blind hands scrabbling useless, finding walls, floor, senseless signals from nerve to shrilling nerve.

The taste of blood in his mouth, and after, the gristly give of his cheek as he chewed through it. Starch sweet and dry on his tongue and trickling down his throat. Spit thick and white-tasting as ricewater — the paper film that forms on top of ricewater left out in the cold. Voices in the silence and pictures thrown up on the walls of what he couldn’t see. Memories like insects under his skin.

Rice broth. Drink up, it’s good for you. – Broth? This is barely tea, Case. Water you’ve boiled something in isn’t broth, specially not when the thing you’ve boiled’s just rice. – And thrown like a shadowplay on the inside of Simra’s eyelids, Caselif pouted and said: Fuck you too, sweetbones and lemme learn you something. Here in Ebonheart, ain’t no such thing as ‘just rice’.

An ache on his scalp and temples, like a setting scab that’d take hours of work and warm water to loose up. Then a hand searching into the roots of his hair. Tight, something tight round his wrist. Whatever you want. Whatever it is you want. – To mark you. You understand that, don’t you? Marking? A savage like you. – Writhe and grind in his ribs as he tried to struggle again. – It’s important. How else will people know you for what you are? – No, please no. Just one? Just two? Just don’t — just don’t…

He screamed maybe. Hard to say when he stopped, but after a time there was only his heartbeat, drumming inside his skull.

A light came above him, sweet as rescue. The first grey sky before dawn, dim but blinding for all it was better than nothing. It anchored him. Slow, slow as he slowed his breathing, and came back to himself.

The grey light flushed pink. Simra stared up, slouched and sitting below, watching as it changed. Bars appeared across the sky when the light was bright enough to show them: an iron grate gone halfway to rust at the mouth of a tunnel. A cell then. He’d suspected it, but knowing something he already knew was better than knowing nothing.

It was damp, smelling of sea and starting to sound of it. Light leaked down the walls, painting shadows where before there’d been only dark. They were hacked into the rock, or else bored down by the work of water long ago. A moment of fear at that. If the water dug this pit, what if it came again when the tide was high enough? Drowned him? But that would be a sentence more than a cell. He tried to hope otherwise.

Gold light glinted on scars in the walls. Chiselmarks. The place was built then, not grown. Still, it seemed better suited to be a well than a room. A narrow-necked tunnel dug into darkness, with Simra, wet stone, and rancid straw crammed into its bottom like lees at the end of a bottle. Might’ve been appropriate – a kind of poet’s justice – if it was the bottle that had landed him down here, but it was the mariner. Broad shoulders; bellowing voice that had gone so quick from calls and coaxing to threats. Not drink but the dumb rut-greed of men. That was the cause; what about the crime?

Grinding limbs and stiffened joints, Simra made to stand. Good to find he had room at least to straighten. He measured the sides of his cell out in paces – three by four and fourteen about – and pieced together what he could. It was a memory skill he turned to: something Kishewyr had tried to teach him, by the shores of lake Amaya. Something like a spell without magic, leaving just an exercise to bend your brain through. Walk through your memory like it’s a place; follow its roadways and find it full of rooms. It had never taken with Simra. He got impatient trying to better what was already good. But he tried it now all the same.

He remembered the yurt pitched on the black sand beach by the rice paddies, just beyond the tideline. Moor-ropes moaning in the wind off the ocean and him grumbling about it too as he wrapped his mantle round himself and led the two guar townwards.

He remembered setting to sell them. Ask with cornerclubs and bed-and-board places for travellers, anywhere with a stable attached. Tammunei had said, Find someone who’ll ride them. And in the end when he sold them to a ricefarmer as draftbeasts, pullers of ploughs, that had seemed close enough to the mark. As close as he’d get, anycase. – Can they wade? – Friend, they can swim. I’ve seen these two ford rivers in Winter with packs and riders. How else d’you think my companions and I got this far off the Plains? – And that’s where you got them, is it? Won’t have no Ashlanders come wanting them back, will I? – Simra laughed and didn’t answer. What good was a weak joke if not to cover something over, after all? A frailty, a weakness, a fear. Twenty-eight drams for the two of them when they were worth at least twenty each. He wondered if he’d’ve got better with a butcher, but that’d be one more lie than he wanted to tell Tammunei.

He remembered the cornerclub after. Sign of the Weeping Eye. Sawdust and sand on the floor to better clear spills and spews. Murky greyglass jar behind the counter where some glowing insect flew spirals and dashed against the walls of its prison. The clubkeep spoke to the jar, gloating over it like an old and broken rival. And going by the cinder-seeming dust gathered in the jarbottom, perhaps it was, or had been.

He’d asked for a drink and then asked for the date. Easy to lose track on the road. – Evening Star, stranger. Eighth day. – And that called for another drink. If not on your Signing Day then when?

So now, Simra thought, stopping to lean against the wall and stare up at the grate-scarred sky. First morning of your twenty-fourth year, and here you are spending it in a holding cell. “Now isn’t that a thing?” he said. “Now isn’t that a fucking blight of a thing…”

But he remembered the mariner by the fire. Nothing much after that, but the daylight had reached deep enough into the well to show him his hands. Broken and scab-stiff skin at his knuckles; the heels of his palms scuffed raw. In his unwashed face, he could feel one eye swollen half shut. His throat was bruised tight, hurting when he tried to swallow, and a few sharper stripes of pain scored the side of his neck. Fingernail scratches.

The mariner must’ve come off worse. If not, Simra reckoned, their places would be switched.

“He’d be down here, and you’d be up there, beat up but let free.” His voice was thick. Chewed cheek; a split lip that split back open as his mouth moved. “The victim…”

If this was the way things had played he was glad of it. Blind drunk he might’ve been last night, but that didn’t stop him seeing when someone deserved a kicking. Fucker. Bay like a dog from the side of the street at anyone not cowed away from walking it, will you? And when they don’t take the maggoty bait that you’ve laid – when they spit on it; spit on you – then what? Talk like you’ll take it by force? Like it’s your fucking right…

The anger had come back by then. Nothing but shadows for memories of what he’d done – but hadn’t that always been the way with drinking?; and weren’t there times when it had been a mercy? – but this creeping shadow of the anger he felt was hard and cold and clear.

He’d tried to swallow it before, for Caselif’s sake. Nights in Suran when he’d be out and come back in the morning, hands still showing on his skin, the colour of spilt wine. That was after the truth came out. The days when things were starting to break, so they tried harder than ever to make them work; smiled and laughed and held each other tighter and hotter than ever like sharing more lies might fix what the truth had done. – It’s simple, Sim. Pays better is all. Some of these pious types, they just like to pretend. Like if they’re taking it, it ain’t about anything but what they’re taking. Power, not… – Fuck that. Fuck them. – They pay better to go away feeling clean? Fuck it, let ‘em. – I swear, Case, if you just give me names… – And take half the rice out our bowls? Sweetness, it’s just pretend. – And those bruises. They’re pretend too? – Nothing I can’t handle. – And it’s just for now, right? – It’s just for now… – …Stronger than I could ever hope, d’you know that? – Pshaw…

He’d really tried. Made a show of caving in, eyes closed and head hung and an almost-sweet sigh on his lips. After all, hadn’t he said it wouldn’t be a problem? Not with him; not between them. Who was he to judge? Everyone sells something. That wasn’t the problem, but rather what these men would want to buy. Simra held onto the rage of it, keeping it close and well-stoked and ready, telling himself it would be there the minute one of those bastards crossed a line. It was important. How else besides anger could he make sure he differed? Hate them or join them, that was the way Soraya had taught him. Lessons he couldn’t shake; wouldn’t want to shake off.

But that was long ago. Today, it blazed down with time, and the sky overhead grew brighter, and the air in the cell grew cold. No jacket, no mantle, no scarf and no boots; just footwraps, shirts and trousers, the seat of them damp from sitting. Simra shivered and waited, seething that they’d taken what they had from him. Why was it always the blighted jacket? Bracelets, bags, rings off his fingers now too, but the jacket was always first to go.

His breath smoked the air. Water shimmered down the black throat of his cell, and he stared, dreading and daring it to turn from a trickle to a torrent and drown him. But the worst it did before stopping was worsen the cold. Force him onto his feet from where he’d slumped in the wet half-rotten straw. And by then standing hurt. He was hungry, but didn’t reckon he could eat if he tried. Thirsty above all else.

Noon came. Or what he thought must have been noon. A sky bright and colourless as steel, enough that he could feel the light on him, a tease of warmth in all this stiff salt-smelling cold. A shadow passed over the cellmouth. Blocked his sun.

“That answers that question then,” Simra said, voice thick as sand.

“Eh?”

“Safe to assume I didn’t kill the fucker. Not if you’re here already.” Simra leaned back against the driest wall of his cell. Worked his shoulders and the pinnings of his back until he felt their stiffness soften. “If it was murder, you’d’ve let me rot a while. Am I right?”

The shadowshape at the mouth of his cell didn’t say a thing. Simra squinted up, trying to make of them what he could. A shapelessness to them, like layers of coat and cloak — cosy, he’d bet, warm-wrapped for a Winter morning, the bastard. Bill-peaked helmet maybe, shade for the eyes. Who else wears a helmet in town but watch or guards? But that was where his reckoning ended.

“So?” said Simra. “Tell me what I’m charged with.” In secret he was glad they’d come when they had and no sooner. Easier now to mask up, give off a bored fingernail-studying calm. If they’d seen him earlier, bloodying his hands against the walls…

“Nothing that’s all that. Just breaking the peace. Davon’s Watch sees its share of brawls on the docks. Usually they sort themselves out…”

“So what’d I do to earn a bed for the night, hm? Woke some light sleepers? Curdled some curds with my choice language?”

“Some shouting, yeah, way I heard it told.”

“You weren’t there, then?”

“Three gods, no, I just got on duty.”

“What else d’you hear?”

“What?” The voice went smug. “You weren’t there either?”

“Right you are! This is all a big fucking misunderstanding. And these?” Simra gestured at his bruised face. Grimaced through blood-tasting teeth. “I got these falling down this big fucking hole this morning, so if you’d just let me back up…”

A tutting sound from above. Two figures now – same helmet – and still less light breaking down into this pit. Where the first voice was round and slow, the second was nasal, sneering:

“There was the matter of some property got damaged too. A shopfront stoved in. A jar of oil broken and poured across the street. Pot-traps smashed. One pavestone pulled up. Blood to be cleared… And a ship captain who kicked up some dust, being down three crewman and not able to sail this morning — threw off the whole itinerary, y’understand.”

A twitch played down Simra’s back. A weight unsettled in his empty belly. “Three?” he said, sounding finer than he felt now.

“One half-drowned when he fell in the harbour – or was he pushed?; yeah, pushed sounds more like it—”

“Kicked’s what I heard.”

“Right.”

“Fucker couldn’t swim?”

“Right. Another dazed and with a broken jaw. That was you and your cobblestone; don’t know why you couldn’t just punch with your fist like civil people. Either way, no condition to sail, y’understand. And then there’s the matter of the third…”

“The big one. Way I heard it, he’s come off the worst. Missing an ear’s what I heard.”

“Missing more than that…” The second voice snorted. A ratty little laugh.

“Good,” said Simra. “I’ve done worse to people deserving less.”

“Now. Now now. The cause of your quarrel’s between the quarrellers.” That same tutting, a sneer sounding all through it. Simra could see why someone like that would join a townwatch. “Our concern’s with seeing justice gets done. Understand?”

A sourness rose like bile up Simra’s gorge. “So — a fine? Sitting me here to stew doesn’t fix windows or pay off plaintiffs, does it?”

“Confiscation of property, as related to the crime.”

Fuck you, fuck you, scratch your stones on a thorntree and catch greencraze you sanctimonious fucking insect, Simra thought. “Related to the crime?” he said.

“Right. Equipment of a violent bent, y’understand.”

“Jacket, cloak, and jewelery?” Simra hissed.

“Armour,” the nasal voice corrected. “A sword and quite a number of knives. And the matter of certain items of unconfirmed enchantment…”

The Nords of some petty Skyrim townlaw would never look past the sword and blades. They’d pat you down for knives and koshes and knuckles but never suppose enchantments lay on every little thing, or shackle a prisoner’s magic as well as their wrists. This was the cost of civilisation. You expect more from people, you suspect more too.

“And what about the matter of getting them back and being on my way?” Simra said through gritted teeth.

“A simple cost, paid to the township, for every item you want returned. All very reasonable, y’understand.”

“Suppose you’ll charge me bed and board too…”

They laughed. “And for rearranging your face for you!” At that, they laughed harder.

Laugh. They might well. They weren’t the ones being robbed.


	46. Chapter 46

“We looked for you,” said Tammunei.

“No need,” said Simra. “I came back.”

Noor kissed her teeth. “From running some gauntlet? Throwing yourself down some gorge?”

“Something like that.”

“That’s what it looks like,” she said. “You look broken.”

“You’ve made that abundantly fucking clear, thank you.”

Simra traipsed the last brief distance between them, across the soft black sand and into their camp. A stone lined fire-pit. The yurt with its canopy furled out from the entrance like some long-muzzled mouth mid-yawn. Both Tammunei and Noor knelt beneath it, shielded from the fine cold mist of rain.

They’d been talking as he approached. Working, crushing roots and seedpods with the flats of their use-knives, paring slivers of things off into bowls and pouches of paper. Alchemy. Some imp-small caprice in Simra half-hoped they’d been talking about him. How long had they searched? How long until they’d have given up if he hadn’t returned? But the rest of him dreaded it. Wanted to sink to nothing into the silt of the beach. Even the way they looked at him was more than he wanted to bear.

His lip was fat, stiff with dried blood. It split open again if he grimaced or tried to smile; made him taste blood if he spoke in anything but a monotone. His one open eye was bloodshot – clots and streaks of black like spider’s legs trapped in amber – lined round the lids and tired and dark. The other side of his face was bruised wine-dark, split open and scabbed at the brow and swollen halfway down his cheek. The bruises continued on under his scarf, under his clothes. Hidden, but they showed in the way he walked. All the worse in the way he sat down, wincing, a hiss in the back of his throat. Not crouching onto his haunches; no care for the sand or dirt as he’d already spent the night wallowing in worse. Just a slump. Like he couldn’t get back up now if he tried.

“Any water?” he grunted.

Noor rose and ducked inside the yurt to rummage. That left Tammunei, knelt in the coat he’d given them. On a day like today it was more sea-coloured than the sea. They angled their head on one side and gave Simra the fullness of their stare. Red-pink owlet eyes, like blood stirred into milk.

“Did one of them butt you?” they asked. “The guar. Kick you?”

Simra coughed up a dry laugh and looked at the ground between his knees. “Not them, no.”

“I could help. Your eye doesn’t look good. You’ve lost it under all that bruise. Is it even still there?”

That was them trying at a joke. Striking bright sparks to feed a dying fire; breathing life over its embers. And that was worse than pity or anger. They said they’d searched. Not ‘where were you?’ Not ‘you had us frightened.’ Just that he’d made them search. And that was worse somehow. When Tammunei Ereshkigal asked around, who and where did they ask? Braving the alleys of Davon’s Watch or searching inside themself, calling in favours from spirits and ghosts to say: Have you seen Simra? He’s gone again.

“Hope so,” said Simra. “I’m done losing bits of myself for shit reasons.”

What if he just hadn’t come back? In the highlands, when Simra came back perfumed huss-heavy with the reek of smoke from setting a piece of horizon ablaze to purge his mood, Tammunei had asked him: Is this why you do it? So that when you come back they’ll be so thankful you’re not gone for good that you won’t ever have to say you’re sorry?

Noor came back from inside the yurt and creaked into a kneel once more. She held out a half-empty skin of water. And when Simra drank it was leather-stale and warm, but sweet for how bad he’d needed it.

“The guar are gone,” she said. “Did you at least get a good price?”

Simra shook his head. The sway and bother of his hair sickened him as it touched his neck, his cheeks. He wasn’t clean. “No.” He drank again, deep, til his mouth felt washed and his voice came easier. “Twenty-eight in glass. A farmer. He took them for draft.”

He jutted a thumb over his shoulder and towards the saltrice paddies that lined the shoreline. Tammunei twitched their gaze about to follow where Simra pointed.

Bulkheads and wavebreaks of piled stones barred off the fields from the sea. Staves of wood, warped with years of wind and salt, struck up from the barriers at intervals, carved with names to say who owned what field. Sometimes a pennant streamed from one: a farmer’s prayer written on scrapcloth. The harvest was long finished, and the fields were nothing but mud, shallow black water, the brackish scent of salt.

A long silence, all three of them waiting for someone else to break it. Tammunei was still, staring out at nothing. Noor worked on, scraping, slicing, mashing with her use-knife. She placed a scrap of shell in her mouth. A moment later, the crack and grind as her backteeth crushed it to paste, and she spat it out into a bowl, pale pink and smelling of colours, pigments, the husked-out old shops and vats of Dyer’s End.

“I fucked up,” Simra said at last. “Lost our money. Not all of it, but most. Twenty-eight drams for the guar and I come back to you with ten…”

“You spent it?” said Tammunei.

“Sort of. No, not really.” The idea made him wince. What would you even buy with all that glass? He hardly knew for how seldom he’d even considered buying something that dear. He remembered Shora on the crane above the water in Riften, spitting when he’d tried to buy her forgiveness with thirty-two pieces of silver. That was the first time he’d spent even close to this much, and in all his life he’d spent more only once. “I fucked up…”

“What happened?” Noor’s voice. Hard to tell if it was gentleness or a simple lack of scorn when he deserved it, but it broke in on him. Too tender. His words stuck thick in the back of his throat and then fell like an avalanche out.

“In town. Sold the guar, so I was feeling alright about that, and when I stopped at a cornerclub for a drink I asked the date, right? My Signing Day, so I stayed for another… And then I was out and I was coming back, going through town to get to the beach, to here, and there was this—… I picked a fight. Not cos I was drunk. I was, but I’d’ve picked it sober too, and done a better job of breaking that fucker’s stones…”

“Why?” said Noor. She had stopped working now.

Simra shook his head. Couldn’t make himself say it. “The townlaw broke it up. Locked me away. Confiscated my…my fucking affects...” He stared into his lap. Closed his eyes a long moment and rubbed at his wrists, firm with his fingers, still raw from the walls of the cell, still scraped from the cuffs he’d worn. Only the copper snake bracelet was coiled round his forearm now. Beads and bangles, all gone. “Gouged me for everything I wanted to get back. Two drams just for my satchel and bookbag. Another five yera for my fucking swordbelt. But I couldn’t get it all. Didn’t wanna come back with nothing for us, so I…yeah…I had to leave some things.”

“You sacrificed the sword but kept the swordbelt?” said Noor.

“Yeah,” Simra murmured.

Swords seldom stuck around. There’d been some he’d sooner have kept, but in the end they all broke or he’d find a better. They weren’t his like the belt was his. Bought with his own coin, made for him, he’d had it longer than it had held any one blade. Swordbelt, spearhead knife, wand, mantle, scarf, he’d kept what he couldn’t stand to lose. Fisherman’s knife and heavy-bladed dagger; boots and jacket, one crude pewter ring; an arrowhead pendant, and necklace of beads and glass. The rings in his left ear they’d shown some small mercy in not pulling out. The gathersack he’d left with the yurt, thanks be. Spear gone, though; sword too. It sounded different when he moved. An empty quiet of cloth and leather.

“They took eight drams maybe on top of that. Not a fine, that. Just theft. Went into my bags fishing for purses…”

Tammunei was frowning, looking over at Noor. “Will we still have enough? For a boat?”

“If we can sell what we’ve made,” she said. “How much more can it cost to cross saltwater than fresh?”

“It’s a long way. I remember that from my mother. Longer than you think, and on bad waters,” said Tammunei. “The Inner Sea has a bad temper. Maybe that will make it cost more…”

“Ghosts and bones!” Simra said, louder and harder than he’d meant to. “You still want to do this. Fuck…”

Tammunei’s face lined deeper, like they were ageing before him. Looking more their age. “Why would we turn back now?”

“Why wouldn’t we? Things’ve gone to shit. That’s what happens when I take the lead. Dunno why I expected any different but I thought maybe just this once…”

“I tried this journey once,” Tammunei said. “Leading people to Vvardenfell. Leading you. That didn’t work out any better, I think. It’s not a journey that’s easy on anyone, but it helps to have the right reasons.”

“And you didn’t? You were a new fucking Veloth after Bodram. A saint leading pilgrims to a new land of fucking promise. Me? I’m just scared of dying. If the right reason didn’t help you, I’m fucked, aren’t I?”

“Don’t play with words you don’t understand,” said Noor. “Your thoughts are stuck in the West. The gods here, and the ghosts that make the land holy — they know that only the Empire say ‘right’ and ‘good’ and mean the same thing, as if there’s no better reason to act than to act for others. But the gods and the ghosts look laughing at that. It’s a dream that makes farmers farm and soldiers fight and die. The good reason is what ought to make you act. The right reason is what will. This is the truth. That the good belongs to the many; the right, to the self.”

“At first I was trying to go home,” said Tammunei. “Like you are now. But even then, I was answering a call. What the dead wanted; what the people following me wanted — I lost myself in that. Being what they needed me to be. Who was I if not for that? But…Noor and I have been talking. She’s…trying to help me find out.”

“Then why help me? Either of you? Clear as anything you’ve got better things to do. Talks to have. Wise thoughts to think.”

“I am someone who helps.” Tammunei shrugged like it was simple. “I can’t stop that. That’s how I know it’s the right choice. And I help you because I want to.”

“But why me? I’m shit company half the time, and what am I the whole rest? I don’t better anything. I don’t help anyone, least of all myself, though fuck knows it’s not for lack of trying… Fuck is it makes you think I’m worth helping?”

“I owe you. And Tammunei won’t leave.” Noor put down her use-knife, hard, on the board across her knees. Her eyes flashed. “Listen. In deep Winter it is easy to forget that Spring will come, but Spring doesn’t need your belief. It’ll come, like it or not, ready or not. Be thankful when it does, and don’t ask why.”

Simra felt like she’d struck him. He breathed out and tried to gather himself to himself. The taste of blood where his lip had split. The heat and flush of not being able to cry. Fucking sophistry, he thought. But instead he buckled, voice broken, sick of fighting them, and sick of fighting himself to win nothing but leave to hate and wallow. He was tired.

“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m the way I am.”

He drank again from the waterskin, washing the inside of his mouth. Cool water over the frayed inside of his cheek, where it had scored against his teeth. He spat a stream of pink out onto the beach.

“Boats, then,” said Noor.

“Right…” Simra felt round the inside of his mouth with his tongue a moment. Gather, Mend what you can. Then talk. “Right. Chance we could charter something if it comes down to it, rather than wait for passage. Might be we’ll have to. Still got the money, spite of my best efforts.”

Tammunei’s eyebrows twitched a question.

“I made some enemies. A boatload of them, could be. And unless they’re already gone on the first good tide out of Davon’s Watch, might be more than our lives are worth to hang around waiting for a better price…”


	47. Chapter 47

_A storm journeyed over Old Ebonheart and its first herald was rain._

_Gutters overflowed and water crashed from the rooftops. The streets below were in flood, in flow, adrift with a scum of forgotten things. Dry leaves leftover from Autumn, winkled out of the corners they’d hid in. An enamelled tray, painted with a pattern of an ocean bed, with weeds framing the ripples and fish-shoals it showed underwater — a sea within a sea. Buckets and cups, wooden tableware, vessels of clay and glass._

_From the hang of a balcony I fished into the flowpast sometimes, trying to snag what I could with a shopkeep’s weight attached to the end of a rope. I didn’t catch much. I wondered about walking the rooftops til I got to the waterfront; exploring the piers and warehouses to see if I might find a fisherman’s hook, a dockworker’s gaffe, a netchiman’s staff — something better suited to this new kind of fishing. But I had seen lights along the docks by night, and the drift of shouts and music, and wasn’t ready to brave it. In the main I watched things go by. I presumed at least the things I didn’t catch would end up at the harbour and out to sea, even if I didn’t. Old Ebonheart, I thought, getting leaner down the years as the weather washed it clean, and the pickers in the ruins ate up its scraps._

_I saw papers go by, and scrolls, and tablets of wax and slate. They were the worst of the things I couldn’t catch. Just bills, probably, and contracts, or lists of things no longer needful. Still it thistled at me to see ink run and paper go to waste. Words lost, and curiosity gone to a strange fool sadness._

_But the storm took more than the things it showed me, but wouldn’t let me keep. Wind and cold screamed in the high places and drove me from the warehouse tower. Rain flooded the colour shop in water the colour of mud, and I waded in, knee-deep, to save what I could from the damp. The sea surged on the long grey horizon and the spray of it rose spire-high, finally showing me why I had found saltlicks and dead seaweed even in the city’s highest heights. And in the clutch of the storm, all the shelter left to me was the dyery, the factor’s pits. So I buried myself there, where the air, the dust, the long-caked colours were always dark and dry, and I still had a chance at staying warm._

_A heavy roof overhead, but still I heard the rain on it. Felt the thunder, as much from below as above, like it shook the earth with its every shout. Hid as I was, I braved a fire, and sat blinking from its thin close smoke, watching the dustmotes dance gold by its light. And I wondered, is that rain I hear, or the first hungry waves, tall as high towers, come to swamp and swallow and topple the city for good? The night was cold and creeping, beneath the hammering storm, and I feared what I would wake to when daylight came again._

_And that was where Tepa found me. Perhaps they’d tracked me. Waited, biding their time. In the tower I’d have been safe from them but not from the storm. In the colour shop I might have had space on my side, and the rusty grate’s shriek of warning. Here I wasn’t so safe. A badger tracked down its hole, and the hounds on the way. Perhaps it was all planning on Tepa’s part, or perhaps they got lucky as my luck failed. Anycase, they’d scented me out. Though the storm had kept me awake, or sleeping light, it masked the sound of their coming. Too late by then. Close and loud and coming._

_The click and crackle of nix came through the dyery, hard to tell at first from the snap and wheeze of my fire. Wet wood, complaining as it took the flame. Then the boiling whistle through their shells as they breathed quick, sharing their eagerness out through the pack. And beneath that, the shuffling feet and shudder-hissing breath of someone cold, moving more than they need to, all for the sake of warmth._

_I thrashed free of my bedding. A tangle of legs and arms, then a creature of hands and knees, and hearthdust grit on my skin. I scrabbled amongst the things I’d gathered – jars and baskets; bottles and bags – finding my feet, finding my knife, any knife. Hearing all the while the shuffle of footsteps, the creak and hiss of carapace and long air-tasting tongues. I touched fingers to steel. The familiar cloth-wrapped handle of my spearhead knife, and the metal warm from living close to my skin._

_“Hey, Firecaller..?”_

_I froze in a crouch, still as a crab in a pot-trap’s belly, waiting for the fisher to come. The voice was Tepa’s: hissing one moment and wet the next, clumsy at the corners, as if tripping from a tongue too thin to shape the words. They were speaking Tamrielic._

_“Hey now. Hey!” Not words for me anymore. The scuffle of a nix-hound’s sharp small feet on the workshop floor. A pop and whining trill. “You’ve done your job. Now be easy… See, Dunmer? They’re not here to hurt you. Nor me. Just to find you.”_

_Their face showed over the edge of the pit. A strange round newt-face, spread between two wide unblinking eyes, bulging and black and far-set from each other. The smooth sleek skin of something unused to being too long dry, motleyed in pale greys and clouds and spatters of blue and sullen red, all drenched in rain and chased with firelit gold. Spines so thin they looked like feathers and moved like grass, fanning around their neck._

_I didn’t straighten. Only stared up, face still half-fixed to snarl. But my fingers unstilled themselves, twitching on the handle of my knife. “You corner me. Come in the night. And you expect me to believe…”_

_“Yes, yes, yes,” Tepa chattered. “That I haven’t come to kill you? Hard to believe, but wouldn’t you rather believe it?”_

_One of the nix whistled again, and settled into a kind of rattling purr. Tongue searching the air, it looked down the pit at me, staring curious out of its eyeless long muzzle of a face. It had a strike of yellow daubed onto the hump of shell where head met shoulders. My eyes raced from Tepa to the nix and back._

_Tepa settled first into a squat, moving strange and boneless, like every action was a kind of bending. Then they sat on the edge of the factor pit. Legs bundled in layers of hide and cloth all bound and wrapped eachover with rope. They swung their feet in the empty air and held out their empty hands. Clumpy mittens, three long and pad-tipped fingers and a thumb sticking blue-grey out of each._

_“I saw what you did to Guls. Found what you did to Drosi. Think I want to chance what you could do to my hide, my hounds? I’d rather not. I’d rather, really rather not.”_

_“Wise of you,” I glared. “But way I see it, you’re still chancing it.” All thunder and no lightning, though. Half-starved and tired and cold for so long I’d not been on talking terms with my toes for weeks, I had no chance against Tepa and two nix. Not with nothing but a knife, and magic I was half-sure would kill me if I reached for it. “Must have a good reason.”_

_A kind of gurgling hum from somewhere inside Tepa’s head. The other nix, head-hump splashed with blue, peered over the edge of the pit and then slumped down, muzzle in Tepa’s lap and mouthparts chewing the air. Be easy, Tepa had said. “I brought fish,” they said now._

_I blinked. Let myself, for what felt like the first time in a long and breathless stretch of staring. “What?”_

_“Catshark, salted. Got any milk? It’s good boiled in milk, I swear.”_

_Tepa slouched down from the ledge and into the pit. I flinched back, skittering away till I stubbed my heels on my jars, my sacks, my baggage._

_“What’s that face?” Tepa asked. “Talk with words, Dunmer. Can’t read you people.”_

_“I killed your friends…”_

_“People I lived with,” Tepa corrected me. “Worked and ate with. Does that mean fondness? Tsscheh. My heart beats just fine without Drosi or Guls. They were closer friends with each other than they ever were to me. The mine though — I can farm that alone, fine, fine, more eating for me. But keep it? Guard it? No. No, I can’t. And you?” That head-deep hum once again. I wondered if it was something like a smile. “You seem good enough at threats. Murder. And you speak Dunmer, I think. You do, don’t you? Speak it?”_

_My belly growled, rattling empty, like the bezoar at the bottom of a finished sujamma flask. I nodded. “You came for help, then?”_

_“To ask and offer,” Tepa gave me back a vigorous nod. “No one stays alive long in Old Ebonheart without a tong. Don’t have things, you starve. Have things, you’ll die soon as someone stronger wants them. But with a tong..? Things stay still. Safe. You killed mine, and don’t have one yourself. The rest’s just common sense. Fish?”_


	48. Chapter 48

Branora was different on paper. Simra’s old almanac map showed it shapeless: a lump stuck indecisive between Vvardenfell and the mainland, with the Telvanni enclave named and the island itself nameless. But in truth it was two islands. A fat short set of jaws set on trying to swallow its smaller sibling. Two islands and a dozen more in orbit; charcoal rocks and dirt the colour of red rust, in a wide broad mist of sea. Perhaps it had been different, some two-hundred years ago. The Red Year had changed the lay of the land, so why not the sea as well?

Craggy and sparse, hills spined the south of the larger island. Overhangs and cliffs that loomed and seemed like as not to fall on you if you sat too long in their sea-damp shadows. Rashes of white-headed fungus clung to the off-black stone where nothing else grew. Simra crouched in the headlands, hands thrust into his armpits, scarf wound tight and high, and looked out over the islands. If he couldn’t put his trust in paper, he’d have to map them anew. Set his mind’s eye to the islands and fix the sight of them there.

A low cove striped across the island’s middle. Young and crude and small, Branoristown stood out on the western bay like a shipwreck. A scuttle of shacks and stilted lodges perched above and beside the water, built spendthrift from the splinter and ruin of the old port town that had sat in its place before the Red Year. Away from the town’s outskirts, the lowlands reached in rockfields and patches of stagnant marsh til they met a narrow sound of sea, and across it the Tel rose up from the second smaller island in a complex tangle. A clutch of smaller Telvanni buildings in the blasted parasol shadow of the great spire.

Frost hung in the air too fine to see except in how it hazed the distance. Salt too, like a ghost on the tongue but a cling-lingering presence on the skin. A film on Simra’s stiff numb cheeks as he squinted over the island, and a thick claggy feeling combing itself into his hair.

Squat-sat on his haunches, he stayed low and bunched and small, hoping the wind’s worst might pass him over. But Noor was walking, shuffling, never still.

“D’you have to?” Simra called above the wind.

If Noor said anything back it was wordless. A hum maybe, too quiet to reach him. Simra turned his head, putting the breeze sharp in his ear and bringing Noor from the corner of his eye to the center.

She tracked out the surrounds of their camp in brief strides, fighting the rough footing. A pause, a lean, then a short leap as she skipped over a cracked seam in the headland. A flutter of robe and dress and shawls around her, like something with too many wings trying to take flight. Going nowhere. Nowhere to go.

She’d been that way since they arrived. Cooped up on the grain-barge from Davon’s Watch after Simra had half-bribed half-begged the captain to embark two days before schedule. Crammed between the rice urns and the quartermaster’s threats: If I see a single seal broken on them jars, I’ll know it weren’t the rats; least not the ones with fur… Simra could understand how she’d want to stretch her legs after that, but an afternoon had passed. Then and evening, and now the better part of a day.

“Noor!” Simra groaned. “Ghosts and bones, I swear! Have you even slept?”

Noor rounded on him, face half-hid in her hair and eyes gone to dark red slits. A scowl. “Do I look like I’ve slept?”

Simra kissed his teeth. A long sound as he turned away and looked back across the islands. “Better than freezing in the wind, I s’pose. Still, not sure what you’re hoping for. Cold won’t catch you if you keep moving?”

No answer.

“Just wish town had somewhere worth staying in. A floor that doesn’t leak and a roof that keeps you dry. Walls that don’t let the breeze beg its way in. A hearth. What d’you reckon they even burn here? Not seen a single tree.”

Just the shuffle of Noor’s shoes. Bare green-forsaken dirt; the sharper scuff of stone, too high for the sea to smooth out.

“Least then I’d be able to salt at you and Tammu about how you just had to insist we camp out here instead of somewhere warm. Thing is though, I reckon Tammu’s the only one on this side of the island with a skinny fucking scrap of sense, you and me in the count.”

Pitched nearby in the hollow under of a rockshelf, the yurt was nestled into the shelter of it, fitting neat into its shadow. A pocket of warmth on the good side of a windbreak. Tammunei was inside, doorflap buttoned shut, doing guesswork-only-knew what. They didn’t want disturbing — that much was clear.

“I see you’re back to your old self,” Noor said. She stopped, peering over the edge of the headland, leaning. Simra remembered Tammunei doing the same at the gorge before Davon’s Watch. Remembered wanting to grab a handful of their tattered coat and pull them back from the brink.

“Chewing your ears off with talk, you mean?”

“Yes. Filling silence.”

“Like you’re filling stillness?”

“…yes.”

But she, too, had fallen still by then. Just the hawkish lean over the rock-edge, staring down the crookback path that had led them up here from the island’s low middle. Wind-quivering layers of skirt in tan, and grey kreshweave frayed at the hems. The thin-soled shoes she favoured, curled a little as she fit the arch of her feet and the cling of her toes to the stone beneath her. The strong flat bridge of her nose in profile; broad-boned cheeks assertive in a hollow face. Age-ridged brow. When she came to move again she crabbed along the ledge, closing on Simra. She halted just out of Simra’s reach but near enough to talk without shouting.

“You know,” she said. “Yesterday — that was the first time, for me. The first time I ever crossed saltwater. It comes natural to Tammunei’s people, the clans of the shores and islands. Our mother’s people, and our mentor’s. They teach their young to swim as soon as they teach them to walk. They learn the fishing spear, the net, the patching and building of coracles – lullabies for fish and sea-shalk and songs to find shellmeat in the shallows – all before they learn the bow. Tammunei likes it — the sea. I seldom see her more at peace than when she can hear water.”

“Reckon it’s not the same for you then.”

“No. No, it’s not the same for me. I felt like dying all the way over and, for sickness, wished I was dead. And I gather that was a steady boat on easy waters?” She turned her face away, showing Simra only the corner edge of a bashful smile.

“Grain boat,” he said. “Flat bottom, slow going. Not got much of a sea-gut myself, but even I was alright… You didn’t seem so bad though — not from where I was sitting.”

“A wisewoman learns the cold-face just as young as she learns to listen. It can be uncomfortable, hearing the dead. Worse still, doing on their behalf. The clan mustn’t know that. So, we make duty a mask.”

“Useful.”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it just hides us from ourselves. I think we teach ourselves the cold-face to hide ourselves from ourselves as much as others. To teach us our feelings, our wellness, come second to serving.”

“The dead kick up tantrums, then? Squall like babes when they’re not fed and crooned for and coddled. And you’re trained from your scalp-shorn days to smile mother-mild and clear up the mess they leave? I can see why you and Tammunei’d take the stand you have. I mean — I say I can see, but I can’t even…imagine, really…”

Noor hummed. Her fingers were in her hair, braiding the ends of one long dust-brown lock into another as the rest hazed round her head in the wind. “‘Scalp-shorn’?”

“Yeah? Y’know, when your ammu shaves your head on the often until you’re marked and you’re not a child anymore and you can grow it out if you want to?”

She looked at him, top of his head and downward. “I’ve never heard of such thing.” She must have seen some twitch or fall in Simra’s face. It must have hurried her to continue. “Perhaps it’s only something Zainab do. I haven’t known many Zainab.”

“Many?”

“Any,” she admitted.

Simra tongued his teeth a moment, then sighed. “Might be a Zainab thing. Or a Mabudani clan thing, or from my mother’s clan. Or maybe it was just something she told us so she could shear us like sheep every so often and sell the hair to someone making pillows and padded jacks a few rows down the Rigs. Fuck knows anymore. Might be I’ll ask her someday, but until then I’ve made peace with it. That and the rest.” A lie, that, but a lie he was at peace with.

“The Vereansu bind the heads of their young to shape them when they’re still soft. Who’s to say why, or what the Zainab do instead.” Noor paused. “Tammunei told me a little. About your marks, your mother. She taught you Firecalling, yes? Herbs. But also to write and read?”

“Sort of. Taught me to swim, too, if you want to know.”

“Was she a wisewoman, once?”

“Something like that,” Simra said. Something more like you though, he thought. Someone stitched all out of ‘was’ and ‘were’ and ‘used to be’ — what they’ve chosen, and what they’ve left behind. “Why’re you asking me all this? Talking to me?” A bitterness had got into his voice. “Haven’t even tried insulting me yet. What’s wrong? What d’you want?”

Noor crooked her head a little toward him. A squint between screens of hair; a mouth small and pursed. “‘Want’? Is it so hard to believe I just want to talk? I don’t know you, Simra Hishkari, nor do I know your people. If we’re to carry on along this path you’ve put before us, I thought it was best I start learning.”

Simra hung his head. Wished for a moment she was sitting on his other side – not left but right – so the colourless curtain of hair that fell down beside his face would hide him from her.

“You expected the worst in Davon’s Watch,” she said. “Abandonment. Betrayal. Now again. Why?”

Because, he thought, put in your place, I’d have run long ago and felt by far the better for it. Because I deserve what I dole out. “Just surprises me is all. Don’t get the feeling you like me much. Reckon you respect me even less.”

“Tammunei seems to think you’re worth something. Worth knowing. I trust her well enough to want to find out for myself. That and, sometimes, it’s good to talk. Good to talk my mothertongue, after so long in silence — even with someone who makes such tatters of it as you do.”

“There,” Simra grinned, weak at first, but growing. “There’s what I was waiting for.”

“Yes, well…” A crackle came into her breathing, like the first sparks before laughter’s fullest flame. The laugh didn’t come though. The sparks didn’t catch. Still, the glimmer of them was more than Simra was used to from her. She tucked a tumble of hair behind one long ear, showing her face as she looked to him. “That and I wonder sometimes. Tammunei and I, we’re each as Ahemmusa as the other. That’s the mother we share. I wonder why Tammunei took after her – after Nanrahamma and Tanet, the Ahemmusa, finding peace in earshot of the sea – and I took after my father and his people?”

“Don’t reckon there’s any destiny in blood,” Simra said. “Were you raised much different?”

“A little, perhaps. But not so different. I was born in a Grey Quarter of my own, in Cheydinhal. Among a clan of Vereansu, pretending that was still what they were — living in tents to forget their tents never moved, and that their guar had all died long ago. That their bows remained unstrung. First we lost our wisewomen, and I lost my tutor for a time. They said they were forgetting how to remember their sacred ways, and they walked back east, Tanet and Nanrahamma. Back to Morrowind. Then my father left, and Jemikh, my mother, remained — ghosts only know why. And between them I chose him, and ventured back through the Niben, through the mountains, to reach Deshaan once more. But what we found was a wasteland – hunger – and we were without wisewomen.”

“They had you. Must’ve been better than nothing?”

“I was eleven years old. Twelve when we reached the plains. There was no one left to teach me true wisdom, so I was given any wisdom going. The hunters taught me hunting songs and the herders taught me songs for herding, though it was a long time before we got back any guar of our own. I learnt bow, saddle and stirrup, how to raid, and all slowly my clan forgot its ghosts. My father, as khan, sent me Harrowing, hoping that I could fell the gap our wise-ones had left, if I returned. The year of my Harrowing passed and still I’d learnt nothing. I didn’t return. Years I walked and wandered, and my path led me to Nanrahamma once more, and Tanet, and to Blacklight. They had wandered in the wasteland too when they left Cheydinhal for Morrowind. They had been forced to trade one city for another, living like ticks on its underbelly. I lived with them in the Tide District of Blacklight – seawater everywhere; the smell and taste of it on everything – and then, tenyear after tenyear later, my mother found us too. She had brought me a brother…”

“Tammunei?”

Noor nodded. “I was a woman by then though, and too old to go back to being her daughter, even if my mother had wanted me to be. Still, together, that was our clan for a time. As my mother passed and Tammunei grew. As the Redoran forced us from Blacklight and into Skyrim. As we lived in the Morayat, scraping and scraping by. You see, I never was much of a Vereansu til lately. A few years as a child, and then a lifetime of lacking it. And I wonder, when I lost my old Ghostline — was it because my father’s clan finally faded away? Forgot itself, because it had no wisdom. Or was it because my father cut me off? Either way, it is at least in part because I didn’t return. I only know I felt it like a missing eye, a missing hand. I deserved it, and was afraid. This was what came of living for myself, I thought.”

“You’ve got your new line though, haven’t you? Now?”

“Them,” Noor smiled then, almost fond. “You know, I heard them crying, calling out, all the while we crossed the sea. I’d left them on the shore. Sown them on the plains. They howled to have been left behind. Squalled like babes.”

“They’re still at it, aren’t they? That’s what’s not letting you rest. Will they be alright? Without you?”

“They will have to learn to be,” Noor said, fixing her face and looking down the island once more. All the while they’d talked, she’d faced that way — northward, with her back to the mainland. “They will learn to wait, and give as well as take. I hold them from the void as they make ready to hold me from it. That should be enough. So, let them learn. Let them squall a while.”


	49. Chapter 49

Simra held out his hands to the stones, warming them as they warmed him. A little heap of scree and slate, glowing smug pink from within as the edges scorched powdery and white. Not a scrap of of brush or scrubwood to burn up here in the island’s south headlands. Only the pale clusters of mushrooms, and who was to say the smoke wouldn’t be poisonous – cook your lungs from the inside out, like vengeance, poet’s justice – or wouldn’t be better cooked than cooked on. So Simra reached out to the stones. Asked the heat to come again, and asked the stones to hold it.

It was more work than just to light a fire. The curl and gnaw of magic as it flowed from him; went from waiting to working out in the world. Something like the slow beginnings of hunger, but with no care for whether he was fed or not. As it happened, now, he wasn’t — but there were worse things to endure; worse tasks to undertake. It gave him an excuse to squat beside the rocks. Share his weight from one knee to the other as the joints conspired to seize and grit. Stretch his fingers to warm in the hazy heat, and look busy all the while. Magicka returns; fire cooks food. Small things, all sorting each other out in the end. That was a kind of peace, wasn’t it?

A mealy smoke fled thin from off the blaze. A reminder that for all the stones refused to catch, something was still burning, mote by mote and hairline margin. Something will always be eaten.

The smoke searched into Simra’s clothes, found out the folds. It hid on him, flint-scented and silent. The pink glow and shimmering air burnt gentle into his eyes. When he looked up, the sky was darker than it was. Black clouds and a grey heavy harvest of fog in crop above the sea. The sun had scarce got started on setting and already he’d stared himself nightblind.

“I was thinking.”

Tammunei’s voice. Simra startled. It took a long frown-blinking moment before he saw Tammunei there in the corner of his vision. A spike of irritation; a spark of glittering discomfort. How long had they been there? The whole west blushing behind their back as, unknowing, Simra shared his silence. For someone who moved half the time in a kind of sleepwalker’s stumble, they’d come in total quiet. Simra had heard no footsteps. Hadn’t so much as known they’d emerged from the yurt.

They met Simra’s eye. He forced his face soft – forced down his annoyance, that feeling of being interrupted – and gave the short nod Tammunei was waiting for. Then neither of them was looking at the other anymore. Tammunei stepped closer, standing over him, arms wrapped round their chest and something tucked under one arm.

“I decided it’s best you have this,” they said, easing the thing out from under their arm. A small hand curled round its tawny leather sheathe, they held it out. A sword, hiltfirst. Slight-curving handle, use-smooth wood clapped either side of the half-hidden tang.

“I gave it to you.” Simra’s gaze slipped past the sword and up at Tammunei.

“Yes,” they said. Their brows were downturned, their hair gone to wisps and coils in the wind. Slight dents between cheek and eyesocket, like they got when they smiled, but their mouth was fixed and grave. “That was when you had one of your own. Now you don’t.”

Careful words, skirting the why and the how of it, like touching someone through their clothes, trying to remember where might be bruised, scraped, tender. A prickling shame at that, hot on the back of his neck. Not at being reminded so much as at requiring this. Tenderness, coddling; the kind of care you give to things easily broken. Simra hummed, turning his head, giving Tammunei only half his fallen face. But his eyes flicked back to focus on the sword.

He’d not liked it much when it was his. Near nothing to guard the hand but a short spur of metal between handle and heavy clumsy blade. More a large knife than a sword and it swung lifeless and final as a hammer. But that was when he had a replacement. Pedantry was a luxury he couldn’t afford now. The cost of preference runs higher the fewer choices you have. Simra found he wanted it back.

“It’s more use to you than it is to me,” Tammunei said.

“…You’ve got a point.” Simra’s fingers twitched. He brought his hands from the glow of the fire and in towards his chest. The cold seeped in soon after, starting to numb them.

“I’ll be fine without steel to protect me.”

“And me not so much?” Simra had meant it as a joke but it came out bitter and thin. He sighed and took the sword by the middle of its sheathed blade, turning back towards the hot stones. Feeling needled back into his frozen cheeks, his stiff lips, then the aching roots of his teeth and the pale scarred fingers of his right hand last of all.

Tammunei shuffled off a moment, not so silent anymore. Simra watched the stones till his eyes hurt. The shadows between them, the ebbing cooling glow, easier on his eyes as time went by. Soon Tammunei came back from under the yurt’s awning with kettles and skillet.

“Fucking freezing. Have a seat.” Simra gestured with the swordhilt, weight of it already a covetous comfort in his hand.

The pot clattered as Tammunei set it down on the hot stones and filled its belly with water from a skin. With a boot they scuffed clear a patch of stony ground and sat beside the heat, the pot, and Simra.

“Fine or not, I ought to’ve taught you when I still could.” He hung his head, working with his half-numb fingertips to make the hangers on his swordbelt take the loops on the sword’s crude sheath. Tighten, slide, adjust so it slung right — as right as something so ill-balanced ever would. “Far as I know anything worth teaching anyway. Hard to be too careful. Vvardenfell and all…” He finished into a mutter before he could embarrass himself. Stood. Gave his swordbelt a final rough adjustment, and loped off towards the awning and his bags.

“Rice again?” Noor said, kneeling in the awning’s shade, eyes closed and motionless.

“And pickles, thanks be.” Simra seized on a roughcloth sack and slung it over one shoulder. Satisfying weight. The shift inside it of saltrice against his shoulderblade. “You think I’d book a ride on a grain boat and not make some go missing? Nchow. The fuck kind of fool d’you take me for?”

“But the mer with the crossed eyes…” Tammunei said from beside the stones, stretching their palms out towards the warmth. “He told us not to touch any of the urns. He said he’d know. How did you take any?”

“Can’t teach you blades.” Simra came back to the fire, glad of it even after a bare moment’s absence. “Not with one sword between us and no sticks in sight. I’d’ve burnt them if there were. But what I can teach you now’s a simple truth. Find a captain on a grain-barge willing to go off schedule for a few drams, odds are good they’ll be willing to part with a little cargo too. Offer them market price when all they’re expecting is warehouse rates, they’ll do it with a smile.”

Tammunei nodded and shook their head, somehow both at once. But they were smiling now and the dents in their cheeks went deeper.

The corners of Simra’s mouth curled too, one arching up overeager like compensation for the other, lazy and stubborn with scars. It was good to talk. Put distance and words between him and Davon’s Watch. Give them all something to think about besides the cold, the cost of coming this far — the road ahead.

He settled back down beside the stones and pots. Hunched then arched his back til he felt it grind and click. If this was what twenty-four felt like… But then it had nothing to do with age, did it? Not the years but how you spend them. The marks they leave. The Rift. The arrow through the neck he still felt sometimes. Not just the arrowhead he still wore on a cord round his neck for a memento, but a stiff cold wire drawn tight through the muscle, when the weather was damp, when he broke a sweat. The docks before that. His father’s back seemed a little more stooped every day he came back from the waterfront. His stance a little more twisted; his eyes a little less bright. Maybe it wasn’t the docks that did this to Simra, but perhaps he was breaking himself the same way — day by day by day.

Still, he was smiling. A wonder what it can do for you, he thought. The smile of someone you like to see smiling. The having of something you wanted. The promise of hot food and waiting for it, almost patient, but safe in knowing it’s on the way. A kind of peace. A kind of happy. The fingers of his left hand traced idleness on the wood handle of the sword as he waited for the water to boil. His right reached out to the stones, urging another wash of heat over and into them.

Tammunei watched in that sidelong way they had, out the corner of their face. Strange how the expressions of old friends can become old friends too. “Who taught you?” they said. “Not magic. That was your mother, I know that. But how to use a blade…”

Simra chewed the inside of his cheek. No easy answer came. Terez maybe, back in the Vahn. But what had she taught him but swinging at air to put strength in his arm? Preferences the world would so seldom live up to. She taught bladework like philosophy but only gave him rudiments, old arguments, no tools to think for himself, and ideals more often than action. Eight cuts, stances, guards perfect as prints from a book, so far as she made them seem… Things to forget as soon as your blood was up and the blades came out in earnest.

“No one in particular,” he said. “A few people tried but I wasn’t ever a very good student. Didn’t take well to being taught. To get clever or skilled you’ve first got to learn just how stupid and ill-versed you are. I got impatient…”

He remembered sparring with Moridene on the great Rift plain. How to turn away from a blade; turn a killing blow into just another scar to live with. How sometimes it’s worth bleeding a little if your enemy bleeds worse. – Every time you move, that’s you tossing a coin. Ain’t like you can always win. I ain’t sayin’ go out there, get hit up. Just don’t play with swords and when you get cut come cryin’ to me sayin’ ‘Shit, Mori, there’s steel in me!’ – She taught him it pays to strike first. That fear and fierceness can be their own defence. And where did that land her? In the mud and bleeding.

“Guess I just…learnt bits, here and there, right? Learning when I had a chance to learn. I do best that way. Teaching myself…”

And then there were the times with Kjeld. When Kjeld took up his shield and told him to get around it. – You’ve got fire in your fingers, Sim, but what about when it’s gone? It’s never good to have just one way of beating someone… No use swinging either. Go for the thrust. The thrust that comes under the shieldwall!

And then there were the teachers he’d never met. A book he’d read once in the library at Suran – ‘Psalmody of the Open-Bodied Blade’ – useless opaque little thickets of rigid-metered verse with the occasional riddling illustration. And then free afternoons alone now and then, revisiting that book’s opposite: the cheap little octavo of Pasarian’s ‘Plays for the Longblade in One-and-a-Half Hands’ he’d bought back in Windhelm, formulaic to a fault.

The rest and most of it all though was hard practice, hard lessons, hard work to remember them clear. Sleepless nights stuck thinking through the way some scrap had gone. Seeing behind his closed eyes a thousand mistakes that could have killed him but hadn’t quite managed it. Teeth grit as his wounds were stitched and he told himself he’d be better next time — better in ways he forgot as soon as the next fight was joined. A year lived by the spear, biding his time and saving his coin – every last coin – to take up the sword again, the pen again, sore-missed for so long. A year and more spent feeling a line of fire up his back, a hand close round his wrist, and telling himself next time it would be different, and when it was he’d take more than just a few fingers, though wouldn’t that be a fine place to start. And maybe then the scab of it would stop itching in the back of his brain. Maybe then it would start to heal.

“Learnt by doing, I reckon.” Simra finished, feeling foolish. “Getting lucky when I fucked up and learning from what I lived through. Can’t say I’ve got much to pass on though. Nothing that’d be useful to anyone else. Just stories, dirty tricks, bad habits, but they’ve kept me alive till now…”

Simra regretted what he’d said as soon as he’d said it. A sharp fear, felt in the back of his scalp like tying your hair too tight. Maybe there was no such thing as fate for anyone like him, but still it was best not to tempt it.

The water began to boil. Simra kissed his teeth, fishing into the grainsack to measure out four handfuls. Three and one for the luck that’d carried him this far, and that he hoped on hope would hold. A seethe of foam in the water, then stillness as it slacked to a simmer.

“Nanrahamma always said that pain helps you remember,” said Tammunei, smile going just a little slack. “It’s a good teacher, but a bad one to rely on. It doesn’t seem like a sign of luck, to have learnt from it so often.”

“Maybe it’s just the right kind of bad luck then. Following me. That sounds more like it. The Curse-Blessed Fate of the Thief, someone I once knew would’ve said.”

“And what did you say in return?”

“Most often? ‘Time to ease off the pipe, Kish, you’re starting to talk crowshit again.’ ”


	50. Chapter 50

_Winter drew on in Dyer’s End but to a different pace._

_Mornings I woke in the attic where I killed Drosi. Above the temple of the Tribunal and above the eggmine below, the same spiretop room where I woke blind and aching, with her voice and Tepa’s talking over my fate. The same riblike rafters where they roped and gallowed me, to half-hang and beat me, time and time over. And I woke to see Tepa, and hear their nix awake and whistling to be fed in the temple rubble beneath us._

_First night back in the spire, before I so much as set down my bedroll, I turned over the floorcloths to hide the dark stains we’d left. Ghosts only know why Tepa hadn’t done the same long ago, but I wouldn’t have them staring up at me now. Scorchmarks and oilblots; burnt flesh and rendered fat. The scent was gone but the shows remained: burns and the blood where Drosi knifed me. But just as I’d taken that knife and made it my knife by then, why couldn’t this room be my home? Hungry, cold, in a city of ghosts and eaters of people — like Tepa said, this was nothing but common sense_

_Still, common sense can cut both ways, and I hadn’t abandoned mine. That first night, stone-tired as I was, I only seemed to sleep. Curled on my side, back to the window and the twitching roughcloth curtain, I faced into the room, watching Tepa through scarce-open eyes. Who was to say the Argonian hadn’t put on all their pretty speeches and pragmatics to kill me in my sleep? Only time. And over time, time told true._

_Over kwama eggs cooked any number of ways, in a silence that shrank further each evening. Over learning the rhymths of Tepa’s days and finding the gaps where I fit._

_“Morning,” Tepa said, more statement than greeting. They crouched beside the hearth, a lump of blankets and belts, prodding at the ashes with a long splinter of wood. “Hungry?”_

_I ached. Couldn’t remember when last I’d woken to anything but aching. One floor’s much the same as another when it comes to sleeping. All as bad as the rest, and the best bedroll in the world makes only the slimmest scrap of difference. I’d scarce slept, eyes unclosed all night. So why was opening them now so hard?_

_“Words,” Tepa clipped. “Talk with words. Muteface tailless dryskins…” They poked again at the hearth. “I’m starved. Got eggs.”_

_“Course we have…” I unsteadied up onto an elbow, then came to a sitting hunch. The bedroll came up with me, clutched cloaklike round my sloping shoulders._

_Two more prods, insistent. A puff of ash from the hearthdust._

_I groaned. “Words. Tscht. You’re a blight of a one for using them yourself, aren’t you? Fire — that what you’re telling me?”_

_Tepa’s tongue flickered out, making their lipless mouth shine. “Yes. Yes, please.” Behind their words that humming sound came, warm from inside their head. They were shivering._

_I clambered up and crouched on the hearth’s far side. There was wood to burn. Sticks and splinters of the stuff, chewed and parched and smoothed with time, seasons tallied in each twist of the grain. If Old Ebonheart had anything aplenty it was fuel to a fire. I cupped my hands and whispered sparks into the pyramid of kindling._

_“How did you manage without me.” I imagined Tepa eating cold fishflesh, raw and til lately wriggling. I imagined them sucking the yolk from egg cells, tongue searching in like the antenna-tongues of their nix, to find out what scraps they’d missed. “Second thought, don’t tell me.”_

_“Doesn’t matter, does it?” Tepa’s eyes bulged towards me, black and so wide-set they seemed cross-eyed trained like this, so tight on me. “I have a Simra now. What’s passed is in the past.”_

_Reaching behind them and towards the wall, they snatched a skillet. Knew where it was from memory. I flinched, half-scrabbling backward. But they only put it by the flames to warm._

_“Sudden movements…” I muttered, red rising in my cheeks._

_“If I was going to kill you, think I’d wait four days and do it with a pan?” Their long neck wrinkled as they drew their head back. Distaste, I think. “Messy. No, no, it’s just for eggs. See?”_

_They took the damp cloth from off the egg we’d been working through, leather-skinned and long as a shinbone. Truffled free two gel-skinned cells from out of the yellow-white pith. I nodded my head into a bow, dropping my gaze, and uncovered last night’s pot of boiled black gram. With my hands I shaped the last of it into pats while Tepa set a little grease on the skillet to melt. Soon it was sputtering. They pinched the eggs open in their smooth unnailed fingers. The skins stayed in their practiced hands. The big righ yolks fell to fry in the grease, sunset reddish and spitting. My panbreads joined the eggs and with our hands we squat and ate there, both from the same black skillet._

_Tepa fed the nix after that. Always. And always as they did, I’d follow into the temple rubble, down the scaffolds that led from the tower, to scull the pots with water and grit in the shadow of the spire, the temple’s still-standing face. If Old Ebonheart had anything in abundance, it was grit and dust and pebbles. Idol dust and icon housings here, gone to nothing but shardments of stone to scour our pots and pans._

_Nix, I discovered, will eat all but anything, so long as it came from plant or beast. The Quarter taught me the same of pigs, but I’d never been pounced and jawed at by a pig as I had been with these nix. To see Tepa’s nix take to meatscraps, bone, eggskins and eggshells, and worse did nothing to ease my unease around them. And the kenning put to them in Tamrielic – hounds – didn’t help either. Scrapping scrabbling things that can climb like sheep or goats and take their sustenance in the harshest places. Tepa scratched between their plates and they leaned and clicked in return. I kept my distance and kept to the pots and was glad when Tepa told them loose, out to forage. But by nightfall they always came back._

_The mine after that, for Tepa. And for me, my long slow watch. This was my new normalcy – safety, company, shelter and food – but in its way it felt like it had come from some great turning. An upsidedowning of things. The enemy I made and fled from had found me and I was glad. The place where Shurfa, Medis, and Balambal had died was where I did most of my living now. And in time convenience and common sense turned to trust. Less from Tepa’s earning it, and more the way any community’s bonds form. Laziness. Laxness. Suspicion is exhausting. Fear gnaws at you, worse and worse all the time as you live with it, like holding onto a handful of ice and longing always to let go. Easier to believe what you’re told is the truth, and those you know are honest. And I think, for Tepa’s part, they were. And in time I tried to be the same, each of us doing our part to keep a run on our township of two._

_My old worries rotted away._

_Starving was always a threat, but now it was on the horizon; a warning more than some wolfish dread closing always in for the kill._

_The cold was there, in the frozen skin of our water trough each morning, and the chill on my cheeks as I kept my watch. But I had blankets and fire, and shelter when I needed, and in Skyrim I’d suffered worse. Not so for Tepa, who shivered and whimpered from it, all but always. After all, their blood was cold all along, and gave them no warmth of its own. So by day they toiled in the heat of the mine and by night they bundled up by our fire._

_At first I worried for the smoke we made. “Might be two of us now,” I said, “but we’re in a dangerous place. What if someone sees? They’ll know we’re here. All they’d need is three…”_

_They only laughed. A hacking sound, each syllable cut out deliberate from the hiss and rumble of their face. “Yes, yes, they will. I count on it. How else will they know to find us?”_

_“Who? Friends?”_

_“Not enemies.” Tepa tilted their head, rethinking. “Not the kind to worry on when they’re standing in front of you, anyway.”_

_The same sights and sounds I’d lived in dread of — time made nighttime shadows of them, casting them away with each new dawn, til a morning came when there were no fears left to dispel. Time rotted my old worries, but new ones sprung from the mulch like weeds._


	51. Chapter 51

Get up. Simra thought it and didn’t rise. His limbs wouldn’t move. His sleep-stiff back wouldn’t shift. Like skin was all he was, slack and gross, like the pale rind pared off a pig when it’s butchered, sent to the streetfood sellers to boil and cure. Sheets and folds, castoff and cold.

It was too hot somehow in his bedroll. Trapped in its wrapping and his road-stiffed clothes, no strength to get out. Only feel the layers of filth-feeling clothes he wore to try and sleep in. Only feel the ways he spent his days worked into them like brocade: walking, fighting, fighting and walking, lighting fires, soaking up smoke, soaking up sweat. Like he stank worse with every day; rotted a little more.

He twitched a finger. Now get up. Clenched one hand but the arm wouldn’t move. The hand wouldn’t raise him up. Get up. Offal, dross, fruit gone to rot on the tree. You’re nothing, worse than nothing — at least nothing has the good sense not to be. No bother to anyone. Not like you, Simra. Lying here, breathing out your sour breath, taking up space in their yurt. Taking up space in their life.

His hands both flexed. His fingernails grit into his palms. Three of them were half-felt, shorter than the rest — the three that never grew. Cold fingers, pigskin white, milkskin white — like they weren’t his at all, and perhaps they weren’t. Stolen more like. Stolen back. Another note in the song of disgust that circled in his head like a mantra. A spell, a curse he’d cast on himself.

There’d been no warning, no omen he ought to make ready. But then there never was. Never is. And perhaps there never would be. Whether it was the old grey curse that followed him wherever he ran, or whether it was something you could cure, he was no more likely to find a warning than he was to find a reprieve. It was part of the rhythm of things now. A workaday sadness that came like hunger or the need for sleep. He’d made peace with it long ago, or told himself he had. But it’s easy to say ‘peace’ in peacetime. Now he and it were back to war.

Get up. Now get up. He thought it, and couldn’t, didn’t. He was fallen again in the springtime by the shores of Lake Amaya. Blood on his face and grit stuck to it, biting and burning. Pain up his back, too bright to feel yet, so it hung over him one long moment. All the mercy of a cat as it pauses, watches the broken mouse try in hope-blind fear to crawl away, then moves in, calm as Winter, and brings down its paw. The pain waited, then crushed down, filling the silence with his scream. Pulled his thoughts outside himself so some small part inside the pain thought: Pathetic, get up. Now get up. And he couldn’t. Not then, not now. Dust on his lips and grazed into his hands as he tried to crawl away. Then came the open fist, the fingers gripping into his hair and dragging back his head by the scalp. And now came the hand round his wrist.

Simra’s eyes strained wide open, mouth filled with the taste of blood and blind panic. Mouth filled with the same old pleas and tongue choked silent. His hands scrabbled at the bedroll, the tangle of his clothes. He didn’t think it this time, just found it happening. He was clambering in a crowd of knuckles and elbows over the others – Noor, Tammunei, a half-formed knowing – and towards the yurt’s doorway like a drowning man swims for the surface. Scratch and fumble at the lacings that kept the door closed. Something swelled in his throat, almost a sob, then sank hot in his gut like a coal. His fingers wouldn’t move. The three of them, stiff and still and frozen, they jabbed at the leather and cord together, without feeling, without motion.

Voices at his back and stirring bodies. The crush of them. He felt his feet against flesh, struggling out of the heat, the crowd, the heaviness of it all. Gelan-Telai, the breach, charging it with all the desperate haste of someone already in sheer retreat. Simra kicked and fell on his knees and hands out from the yurt, onto the stone outside.

In half the sky above, the dawn had begun to form. Beneath his palms and fingers, frost and the rocks of the island.

A groan at his back. Only Noor’s voice, groggy, muddling out an oath in Velothis. The kind of thing she’d never say fully awake. Simra’s neck griped as he turned to look over his shoulder, face cold and sweat-damp now in the breeze. The doorflap to the tent shuddered. A hand tried to paw it closed but failed with the lacings that would seal it. Simra hissed in a long breath, cold between his teeth.

Here, he thought. Here in the here and now. Safe and something like whole again. He was here, unhurt, among friends. What would they think if they knew? When they knew. If they didn’t already know…

His head shook, hair stinging at his cheeks and jaw with the violence of it. Here, he thought. Here now. He was on his hands and knees, barefoot on the rocks and the frost. Get up, he thought. And he did. A slow upcreaking, his back uncrooking, and then he was on his feet. Freezing, numb in moments. He’d gotten so used to shoes… He rolled his shoulders, unseizing the joints. He stretched, arching his spine, and the start of today’s sunlight fell cold and stone-coloured on his face.

The sea towards the dawn was flat and grey and creaseless. If colour had glinted pink on it, or burnt beneath its hem as the sun rose, he’d missed the chance to see. Or else the colours were hidden in clouds, the sky mist-white and dense. Simra blinked, squinting out across the water. A long splinter of a boat drifted on the ocean. A wheel and spiral of darkwinged shapes moved slow in the air above it. Fisherfolk out with the twilight, and racers greedy for a share of their catch.

Simra padded on stump-feeling feet over to the headland’s edge. Sat and watched the clouds hide the light and the light try to outbreak the clouds. Watched the racers dive and follow the boat as it lazed back to land with the tide. At least he was up now. Sing your victories, he thought, however small. A cold shard of something settled in his chest at that. Shame, same as ever, that he was the sort of person that had to think such thoughts and call them hopeful, helpful. Weak and helpless, to cling to so little. But it tired him too much to hold onto for long, and for a time after that he thought nothing at all. Just felt the cold in his unfeeling feet; the warmth of his hands, tucked under his arms and inside the folds of his mantle. He began to shiver. His breath was smoke.

The sea stretched wider as the daylight spread. A clear morning might’ve shown him Vvardenfell to the north. Best it wasn’t a clear morning then. Best he not feel the fullness of it. How close he was getting; how far off he still was. He’d have to tell them at some point, and dreaded having to do it. And when? How long could he veer their course and say it was still the long way to the Grazelands? When does the truth get easier to tell than keeping up a lie? Best to stay here, between places and purposes, where nothing would happen and everything would stay possible without ever needing to be done. It would give him a chance to write. Ghosts and bones only know that he needed it.

“How long’ve you been at it now? Since Bodram? And your pen’s still stuck in Old Ebonheart? Pathetic…”

His face was still as he spoke – sucked his teeth in silence without opening his mouth – no trace of a smile nor even a twitch of disgust. A flat grey mask of himself; see, there’s the scars, the crooked slight-curl of his mouth; see, there’s your father’s eyes, the marks your mother cut round them. He had leagues and leagues to walk, he knew, but worse were the years he had to write through. They wouldn’t tell themselves.

“Shut up. Shut the fuck up.”

It was tiring. Scarce awake and the day had drained him. He sat, arse cold and getting sore against the hard stone. Watched smoke rise in hair-thin streaks from Branoristown, across the island. Easiest for now to be nothing at all. Think nothing and only be skin. Perhaps he’d made peace with it. Just as likely the war with it ended long ago. The grey had won, in its way. Clawed out a home in his life from which it couldn’t be shifted; taken more of him than he’d ever get back. Easy some days to forget that, but on days like this — never.


	52. Chapter 52

“Simra? Sim. Ghosts, you’re frozen!”

The sun was higher now. When had that happened? Slow through his stupor, slipping his notice. It was hot on Simra’s brow, the bridge of his broke-and-set nose. His heart sped like it knew something he didn’t. Some creeping closing terror. But it was only Tammunei, standing behind him, crouching down beside him, worry high in their voice.

“How long have you been here?”

“Don’t know.” Hard to recall. He remembered clambering out of the yurt. Knees and elbows, spiking and fighting his way over Noor and Tammunei as he went. But that felt ages ago.

“More than long enough. And no boots? Bones and blood, Simra!”

Tammunei rounded him, about to his side on their knees. Took hold of his shoulders in their hands like they were about to shake him. Simra flinched, blinking fast, heart battle-loud in between his ears. The fret had gone from Tammunei’s voice. In their words and face now, something almost like anger. Maybe he’d seen it before, but so seldom it scared him. In Bodram when they returned together, tailing the mabrigash, aiming to undo what she’d done. The disgust that came over them when they found the Sadras had invited her in. Before they found Noor, and found it was all her. And then in the highlands, on the way to Bodram for the first time. Simra remembered Tammunei’s face above him when he fell and when they healed him, furious with worry and starting to sing.

“You’re shivering. Why would you — How did you — Hhh!”

They hissed, forcing round Simra’s body to face them. Head tilting, pointing off to seaward, Tammunei stared at him, searching out his eyes. Something stung at the corners of them like sleepsand. Simra dropped his gaze and half-fixed it on the pattern of Tammunei’s old faded scarf. Waves and diamonds; patches of wastes where the stitch came unstitched. When Tammunei spoke again their voice had softened.

“Simra… Listen to me. Come on. Get up. We need to get you warm. I’ll light a fire. Get up. There. I’ll help. Up…”

Small urgings. A hand under his arm, then an arm, then a shoulder beneath his shoulder. Tammunei’s head crowded in just by his chin and his head filled with the scent of their hair, like the scent of where they slept in the yurt. Wet fabric, salt, stoneflowers. Spicewood like back in the square of the Old Ebonheart citadel, where splintered pillars bled perfume out into the cold of the night. Tammunei helped him to his feet.

“What’s there to burn?” Simra asked. He sounded half-drunk. Shaking too, like someone the battleblood’s just abandoned, sick of a sudden and trembling.

“What’s there to—?” Half an echo, then Simra felt Tammunei’s shoulders slump under him. “Blight! Troubles take this fucking island… Noor! Noor?”

The world blurred now they were moving. Like the wind that cried over this island could set it all to shaking, like leaves, like the branches of trees. The bare stones shuddered. The sky bled colours which stained into the sea.

“He’s caught a chill.”

“I can see that. Teeth clattering like wind-chimes in a gale.”

She was there a moment, clear as clear, ducking from out of the yurt. Then she was past him as Tammunei bundled Simra inside. The short fall crushed the air from him as he slumped to the yurt floor. Bedrolls, sleepingskins, still warm from the bodies that had slept in them. The wise-ones talked fast outside. Velothis, but Simra had to try hard to make sense of it.

“I told him. Weeks ago I told him. He’ll catch some winter fever and what then? Slow us or stop us, and I’d sooner he didn’t. He’ll need steam. A pot of tea ought to do, inside. Cloaks, coats, whatever you can be warm without. Heap them on. Fire?”

“There’s nothing to burn.”

“Sheogorath’s madness! Of course there isn’t. What about the stones — like he does. Bake them hot.”

“How’s your Firecalling, Noor? You never took to it, like I never took to it.” A hollow laugh. “He’s the only one here with enough fire in him to make stones burn.”

“Well. He won’t be doing it for himself.”

Sleep beat its wings over him. A fluttering shadow, falling lower and lower over his eyes and the front of his mind. At least he was out of the wind. It scratched at the yurt walls like it missed him, but couldn’t get in. A good place to lie. Sleep beat its wings and smiled welcome, taking him to itself.

“Don’t let him sleep!”

“Simra, listen to me…”

Time by then was strange. Forming clods and slows, like oil half-setting in the cold but never quite stilling to ice. Things crawled, then flowed, and then came back in a growling humid warmth that flushed his cheeks and put sweat on his brow. The scent of tea filled his lungs. Smoke too, from some small and struggling fire. He could hear it — outside, fighting for breath against the breeze.

Simra’s first thoughts were of shame. He hacked up a cough, throat dry and thirsty. He’d stopped shivering. Only now his skin felt waxen, like it was starting to melt. There were things wedged under his arms and between his legs. Clothwrapped shapes, shedding heat and losing it into him. Hot rocks to warm him. The fuss they’d gone to over him…

“You’re awake?” Tammunei upped the doorflap and peered in at him. Clambered in on their knees, then twisting to sit and shuffle free of their shoes. “How d’you feel?”

Disgusting. Ashamed. “I’m sweating…” Simra tried to shift but for the second time today he was heaped to trapment in blankets, hides, fleeces.

“Careful! You’ll – ah – you’ll knock over the tea.”

“Tea?”

“Steam,” Tammunei explained, showing him half their face, and half a frown-eyed smile. “To warm you from the inside as well. When you breathe.”

“Uh.” Simra grunted. Stayed still. Slumped his head back down onto the bedding and stared at the sun patterns, shifting through the stretch of hides above him. Like looking at skin and realising the colours and shapes you see are blood, nerve, the twitch and rest of tendons.

“Noor thinks you’re a fool.”

Simra agreed. What were you thinking? Wait out in the cold till they find you? Well now they’ve found you. Seen you like this, for what you are. Idiot. Trying to die, is that it? Not the first time but you never can come at it straight, can you? Not even enough to admit it. Too much the coward even for that. He thought into a long silence, saying nothing.

“But she also says she understands. I don’t,” said Tammunei. “I don’t think I do. But I know you. The rhythms of you. And I try, you know? To listen to what you don’t say.”

A kindness so keen it hurt. A hurt that stung out in anger. “So. What was I saying?” Simra snapped. “With all this? What’s it say to you?”

“That you wanted help. Needed it but couldn’t ask out loud.”

A growl started at the root of Simra’s tongue. It wearied away into nothing before he could lash out. The breath left him in a tattered sigh. “Noor’s right.” His eyes were hot and sore, aching at the corners. In a clench and curl of his stomach he sat upright, head hung down and hair pale wet round his face. “I’m a fool but I’m fine. I’ll be fine.” Flat words, foreign-feeling on his tongue. If you’re going to lie at least find some enthusiasm for it. He found none; changed his tack. “What did you find to burn?”

Tammunei’s eyes hooded themselves, going sad at the edges. Tired and heavy. They gathered their mouth. Thinning lips like they were keeping something unsaid. All that in the short aching quiet before they spoke again.

“There’s no wood but it smells like woodsmoke.” Simra pressed on, away from talking about himself. It would be easier with most anyone else. Most people only listen as a way of waiting for a chance to talk about themselves. Not Tammunei. “How’d you do it?”

“It’s…simple but not? You can see it sometimes,” Tammunei said. “By the sea most of all. Shelled things and bone shapes, dried up and long dead and gone still. Wood petrifies. Everything can turn to stone in time. I told that to the stones.”

“And…asked them to do the opposite?”

“Yes. To remember how to burn.”

“That can’t’ve been true though? Of the stones here. Does that matter?”

“Not if you lie.”

Simra’s mouth crooked open. “You changed stone to wood? That’s…”

“It wasn’t easy. Noor had to light the fire. I didn’t have—… I couldn’t—…” They sucked in their cheeks and hunched their back, turning a fraction away from him. “But I did it.”

Simra thrust a hand through his hair, pushing it back from his face. He tilted his chin up, jaw clenched, eyes to the yurt’s roof and walls and looking for something to look at. “What if you hadn’t?”

Tammunei’s shoulders jerked. A decisive shrug.

“Would I have frozen?”

“Noor and I would have had to lie on you.”

“Thank you,” he muttered. It had to be said. Easiest to make light of it. “Thank you for not doing that.”

Tammunei was shuffling into their shoes again. Low shapeless boots of napped hide, kept half up the calves with tied bands of mud-spattered green cloth. “What I did…” they said. Simra watched their fingers fumble to tie the knots, the shape of their tongue flexing against their inside cheek as they focused. “I don’t want to have to do it again.” Then, like a bird catching sight of something it’d sooner not share the ground with and taking wing, Tammunei was up, lurching past the doorflap and into the wind once more.

It left Simra with a slow feeling, cutting through the grey, but clear as a slap in the face. Tammunei had scolded him.


	53. Chapter 53

_They came through the misty morning. No sight of sea from the spire above; it was all made over in mist. A thickness in the air so with every breath in came the wet cold and the need to cough. And they came from off the alleys of Dyer’s End, mudcaked to above the knee. The storm had passed but left the city a swamp of cold water and half-icy sludge so as not to be forgot._

_“Tepa here?”_

_“Who’s asking?”_

_They were a sturdy looking bunch and stern. Four in all, two tallish hack-faced House Dunmer, one towering Nord with a matted chest-long beard, and a ratty Altmer, strange in his shortness and mouse-brown eyes. The Nord wore skins – seal or the like – and carried a great long-handled rockbreaker’s hammer over his shoulders, like a beam or the spar a dairymaid at either end of which a dairymaid hangs her pails. The others wore homespun and patchwork. Colourful they might’ve been if not for how the colours had faded. Hands on knives and clubs, except the Altmer whose hands and stooping frame were taken all up with a backstrapped basket, like a beanfarmer might hunch through his fields with, picking into it as he goes._

_“Herke,” the Nord introduced himself. “Herke and the boys.”_

_He gave a shrug and a lazy turn before looking back to me, like counting his three boys took a disportioned amount of doing. His Dunmeris was passing but the accent thick and almost familiar. An Eastmarch accent drags itself laboured through the nose and upper throat, seeming put upon by having to voice anything at all. Marks emphasis blunt and slurring, like an ill-honed cleaver in the hands of a butcher, parting meat from meat with grunting and persistence alone. This Nord’s accent jangled and tripped. A Wintring, like the horker hunters and fishers of leviathan who would come down the White River on sleds when it froze, and camp at the Windhelm docks selling fats, skins, lamp oil._

_“Good. Tepa told me I ought to expect you,” I lied. Tepa had told me to expect comers. Rough company, calm company — they hadn’t been specific as to which and they hadn’t been specific as to who. This was the first I’d heard of Herke, let alone his litter of overgrown philogenically unlikely boys._

_“Who’s asking who’s asking?” one of the Dunmer said, peering down his nose. He fingered the cutting head of some carpentry tool – an axe-like adze – stuck through his belt._

_There’s one who means to be trouble, I thought. Who thinks fuss’ll catch the eyes of the boss and bring favour. So I ignored him. Cut him clean from the conversation. Spoke straight to Herke, talking Nordic. “I’m Simra Hishkari, Tepa’s new tongbrother. You’ll have dealt with Guls before, or Drosi, I reckon? So you’ll know how this goes by now. You tell me what you’ve got to put up and I tell you the eggs it’ll buy. Seller’s rules.”_

_The Dunmer with the adze hissed. “What’s he say?”_

_Herke pursed his mouth behind the birdsnest of his beard. Stroked its scragged tips down by his sternum._

_“Why’s it you speak milkskin, hm?” The Dunmer with the Adze put in. “Mongrel, are you? Hm, no. Be taller if you were.”_

_“Just had the pleasure of walking the world beyond the bounds of this little pisspot of a place is all,” I said. “Learnt some things in my time, languages among them.”_

_“Tschaw. You’re – what? – a whelp with twenty summers to him, hm? Hey, Herke. Herke…”_

_“I heard you.” Herke turned and stilled Adze with a stare. A stony look and soon it faced me. “We had heard of hard times for the Eggminers,” he said in Nordic. “There are half as many of you now as there were. Half as many of you as of us, and I see only . . . hm . . . ” He counted again, slow, brow furrowed, like it pained him. “I see only half of you here.”_

_“Don’t fuck about deliberating how to bait the hook,” I said. “Get on and cast the line. You want to know why bother with trading, right? Why not deal with me and then deal with Tepa and take what you want from the mine.”_

_I fought to keep myself still. To keep my face cold and level, thinking of the wand in my boot, the fire I might call if all this turned sour. The slim chance I might still stand if chance was on my side. I sat where I sat, on a crop of solid fallen stone halfway up the slope towards the temple spire and a little above the entrance to the eggmine. Rubble they’d have to climb. Hard to come all at once. Half-truths I told myself to seem almost unafraid._

_“That might be so,” said Herke._

_“Never been down an eggmine, have you? The tight and the dark and the stiflesome heat. The grubs that scent you as soon as you step down and into their hive. And d’you know what they smell? A stranger. And who else do they tell but the warriors? Awful things, plated and rearing on two legs so they’re left with more arms to claw you with, but it’s the mouth you’ve really got to worry for . . . Anycase, there’s a reason I don’t go down there myself.”_

_Adze shot a questioning glance at the other Dunmer. An old-looking mer with a neck that sagged like the folds on a sackcloth scarf, he gave a small nod, confirming my story. A farmer then, once? He had that look about him. Old before age was ready for him; alright with being bored._

_“Be that as it may,” said Herke, “I still have a curiosity.” He changed to Dunmeris, like he wanted his boys to hear and know the answer to what he asked. “I wonder why Tepa still feels safe? Safe enough to mine as they did before, and with only you here to mind things. After all, not every tong is as thoughtful as we are, and Winter is always a hard time in Old Ebonheart.” No trace of a threat in his tone, but plenty in the stares of his tongbrothers behind him._

_My mouth stiffened. Twitched. “Your point?”_

_“There were four of you once. Who can say, but it might be that four tongbrothers might protect Tepa better than one?” Threats now, and in earnest. “What do you think?”_

_The Altmer’s tongue flickered over his thin lips. Good to see someone showing their nerves worse than I was. “I think – ah – I think Tepa’d do well to be very grateful. Grateful to anyone providing – ah – that much . . . protection?”_

_Herke stroked his beard. “That might be so.”_

_“Tepa’d do well to do whatever we asked,” said Adze. “Bring up what we want brought up. That’s if we sat where you’re sitting . . .”_

_“I think I have it now,” said Herke. “The source of my curiosity. I would be interested to hear Tepa’s answer. What makes you – one slip of boy from beyond the badlands; Windhelm, is it?; a Grey Quarter greyling? – what makes you as fine a replacement for Drosi, and Guls, and Amlis, as Tepa seems to think you are?”_

_I grit my teeth tight in my closed mouth. When your defences fail, it’s time for a charge. “Simple.” I shrugged, and forced a smile, scars stretching on the side of my face. “I killed Drosi and Guls and Amlis. I can fight with the strength of three. Four maybe. But I only eat one belly’s share. Simple arithmetic says that’s a better deal. Least I reckon it is.”_

_Herke stroked his beard and hummed. Raised one hand from off his hammershaft and scratched at his head for a long slow moment. Adze was all but vibrating. I watched his fingers itch. The Altmer watched the others with darting mouse-brown eyes. The slack-necked Dunmer hugged himself, still and small, like he was colder of a sudden than he had been._

_Stupid boast to die for, I thought. A stupid way to die and a shit day to die on. Found out in a lie and crushed to the mud over the question of some kwama eggs . . ._

_At last, Herke spoke. “Simra Hishkari.” He tasted the name and nodded. Carried on like nothing had passed between us. Just shopkeep and customer, like anywhere else in the world. “Herke and the boys have this to offer you. Twenty-four good iron nails, one pottle of smokefish in salt, one flask of the Stiltlord’s good sujamma . . . and a good-hafted well-headed hatchet.”_

_I tried not to sigh my relief. Turned my tone almost bored so it wouldn’t flee back too far the other way. And we bargained. I bore in mind the sense of worth Tepa had given me for each size of egg and sent Herke and his boys home with the Altmer’s back-basket just heavy enough that they didn’t feel cheated — the moment our rates seemed unfair is the moment Herke would start thinking again how else they might get at what the eggmine offered._

_For my part, I had a hatchet to hang from my sash. Not a sword but far better than nothing. Iron, and sharp, and able to hit harder than a punch. I was thankful._

_Sun shy and lazy, the fog had scarce begun to burn off before night came, and new cold, new fogs with it, heavy as rain and searching wet into every cranny of your clothes. I steamed by our fire that night in thought. I’d been brought unwitting to a new and working world with its own rules, its own unspoken and spoken agreements. I was folded into its fold, and treated incidental, like I belonged. Natural, I suppose. When no-one’s welcome, all are welcome; when everyone struggles much the same, there’s an understanding in the air. Ambient, all in everything. Even conflict, combat, theft and argument._

_So, a new world then, but one not unlike the one that raised me. I thought it before, back with Tammunei as our caravan entered Old Ebonheart, and again I thought it now. A city of ragpickers. What population fit better a city of rags? My people, then, living in terms I was surprised to find I understood all too well. Strength makes for civility, and the law that others hold to is the law to which you can hold them._

_I began to bargain in the days that followed, beyond Tepa’s cold drab unambitious estimations on the worth of each sort of egg. Another way I was better than Drosi, better than Guls. Another way I made myself seem better for Tepa and any callers we might have._

_“One other difference,” I’d say, “between me and Drosi. She was stock-still, right? Wouldn’t budge? But me, I love a deal. You want to jostle a bit – cut something that’s kinder both ways – I’ll listen. No safe bets I’ll bite. Might be I’ll just laugh. But I promise I’ll listen. Gets boring otherwise.”_

_And that kept the comers coming. Not just our product, but the to-and-fro, the duel of it, and the hope. The hope that next time might be better. The hope that one day they might come, and catch me in a generous mood. And sometimes I’d give it to them. Hope needs feeding, after all._


	54. Chapter 54

Tammunei knelt, back straight and shoulders steep, and fussed at their hair. Little bone comb in their hand, sawing away at knot and tangle like a gardener trying to pull weeds. Same disappointed surprise every time they found one. Same noises too. Laboured silence, concentrative, and sometimes a hiss or squeak of pain as they tried to gnaw through some lock or botched braid, a tangle more obstinate than the rest.

That was Tammunei’s half of the woven mat. Simra’s was scattered and littered. Pens and papers and parchments. Notebook bound in swirl-dyed purple cloth, coarse blotty kreshrag paper inside. His inkstone in its yellow bone box, with wetting brush and dipwater. Posters torn from bounty boards and contracts long expired. He sat amongst it all, legs crossed under him. Elbows on his knees and chin in his hands. Back bent forward and down at a slant.

Books, scrollcase, papers, pens. None of them were in use but they made him feel like he wasn’t making a complete uselessness of himself. He’d rummage amongst them sometimes, checking he still had something he’d all but forgotten till then. He’d look at old records of spendings and gettings until he felt hollow and sick and had to stop thinking about money. He’d sharpened the edge of his sword already, so long and so often it’d likely notch the first chance it got. Action on action and none achieving anything much, in a constant struggle to just be doing enough. Like someone stuck inside, waiting for rain to pass and trying not to let it waste their day. Wasn’t that always the way?

Noor returned somewhere towards noon. Her figure was curled against the wind, wrapped in layers of blankets and the napped hide rainslouch she wore, shawled and bound over her old and age-thin robes. She climbed the last lip of the headland and huddled across the frost-mazed rocks and towards the half-sheltered dip where the yurt sat.

“Blessings.” It came curt. Tammunei’s teeth were grit as they worked the comb.

“And on you.”

“What news?”

Noor walked the last few strides and stood at the corner of the mat beneath the yurt’s awning. A heavy shrug and she stuck out an arm towards the stiff white sky, the hiding ocean, mistbound and muffled to silence. “Cold,” she said, murmuring. The chill had stolen the flex from her mouth. “The wind bites. Anything cruel about the plains, the sea makes tenfold worse.” She troubled to purse her lips and seemed like she might spit.

Tammunei raked up with the comb and stabbed it into their hair, holding a nesty bun there at the top back of their crown. “You’ve been into town?”

“Yes.” She bent and slung off a gathersack, and bundled it to the ground. From her other hand she set down a black clay jar, carry-string muzzled round its sealed mouth. Skull-sized and pot-bellied, no mark on its outside to say what was in it.

“Thought I’d have to go.” Simra hadn’t noticed she’d gone till after she was back. “Usually the way, right?”

“I thought so too, until it became clear that you wouldn’t.” She reached out with a foot and pushed the jar towards Simra. It wobbled, then shunted over, rucking the edge of the mat. “This is for you. The pock-faced Baelathri in the pickle shop said it would put fire back in the belly and spring back in the step.”

“Useful.” Simra bent further, leaning towards the jar till he could hook one of its strings by a finger and pulled it to him. He sniffed at the paper seal on it. Tapped it with a fingernail. The sound was dull and full. He crabbed it onto his lap, between his knees. “What is it?”

“Sweet,” said Noor. “I just got it because it seemed the sort of outland perversion you’re so weak for. Good with rice, the merchant said.”

For all her scathe there was a smile in her tone. Simra felt it prickle unexpected up the back of his scalp. He took the small razor from its hidden-stitched pocket in his jacket and worked to cut open the seal.

“The harbour is full of ships,” Noor continued. “Boats, tying up wherever they can find space. Bumping bellies and sides. It’s a racket.”

“Any bound for Vvardenfell?” said Tammunei.

“I asked. None bound anywhere, so far as I could tell. They’re all waiting.”

A sigh of thick sweet scent rose up from the split paper seal. Garlic, the toasted nut richness of dried hotpeppers, and the sharp fizz of ferment. Simra bent his nose to it. Breathed in then cricked his neck back up. Half-listening before, he gave Noor both his ears now. “Waiting? Well, fuck. They’re Wintering here?”

“That’s not usual for Winter?” Noor’s brows knit. “I had thought . . . on the plain, you pause. Put down roots somewhere secluded. I had thought it would be the same with boats.”

“Not here.” Simra shook his head. “Not on the ordinary. Up towards Blacklight, Solstheim, Skyrim, maybe, and that’s only for the sake of ice. Must be we’re in for a bad one.”

“Winter?” said Tammunei.

“Reckon so. Might be there’s ice on the Vvardenfell coast? Or someone’s put the fear up everyone, foretelling some sort of squall. Anywhere with some sea to it, it’ll have weatherseers, weatherworkers, and they love the attention that comes with forecasting a storm.”

“I can believe either,” said Tammunei.

“Dew on the moor-ropes this morning,” said Simra. “Frozen. Icicles hanging off them. Like glass, like moss.” He’d snapped them off then, jangling and wet, cramming the cold shards into his waterskin with hands that first felt icy, then numb, then curious-warm. Free water was one kindness that came with the Winter months. Easier to harvest a potful of snow than catch the same measure of rain. Easier to snatch dew from the dawn when the dawn’s so cold the dew freezes. Easier than getting water from Branoristown and paying for the privilege. “So yeah — bad Winter? I can believe it.”

“Then we’re stuck here,” said Noor, “same as them.”

“And they’re stuck here same as us,” said Simra. “Think any of those boats you saw had bellies full of grain, Noor?”

“How should I know?”

“Well. If not . . .”

“So little grows here,” said Tammunei. “Branoristown and Tel Branoris. They’re both fed by the mainland?”

“Who knows how the Telvanni feed themselves, but I’d say so, yeah.”

Noor wrinkled her nose and snorted. Almost a chuckle in her voice when she spoke. “Sorry to say, Simra, it looks like you’ll have to share your medicine.”

He looked down into the jar she’d brought up from town. Deep spice-red honey inside, bead-sized bubbles, and a tight pack of cloves, tooth-white. His stomach growled. “We’ll need more than pickled garlic to get through Midwinter here.”

“What do we have?” said Tammunei.

“Hm.” Simra looked over at his notebooks, his papers, like he hoped they’d have an answer to him. “To eat? Let’s see . . .”

He clambered up in a griping of knees that faded as he started to move. Like a scavenger looting over a battlefield’s leavings, all keen eyes and low hopes, he brought out his bags, picked through them, emptied them out onto the mat.

His rolled apron of chitin and steel scales, bound up with its own earth-red sash. A sealed compact of glazed clay and a few twists of dried guljana root for chewing. A pouch of salt and a bone-needle sewing kit in a messy-broidered little wallet of cloth — his own handiwork, in idle moments. A paper-wrapped brick of black fermented tea, half crumbled already into countless kettles, and looking now like something gnawed at.

“Could you make a pot of that?” he said, to either one of the others.

Noor stooped and knelt, and snagged up Simra’s kettle. Paused. “Heat?”

“Fuck . . .” Simra balled his eyes shut and knocked the heel of a palm into his forehead. “Stupid of me. Right. It can wait. That sack of yours — see what you’ve got?”

Looking back to his own things, scattered and rolled across the mat, Simra’s brow furrowed. It was good to have work that needed doing; a spur at his flank or whip at his back. Might be you can’t beat the grey, but there are times where you can forget it. His eyes slid particular over it all. An earthenware jar of preshta-jan, rough and unglazed outside flecked with red where spatters of the oil inside had freckled it. A grubby little bottle of tincture: wickwheat spirit, marshmerrow cores, mammet’s switch, a sickening spoilt-milk colour through the hazy grey glass. A cone of set black sugar, shrunken and irregular with all Simra had scraped from it. A folded paper purse with the last scraps of black hunter’s finder mushrooms he’d not had the heart to finish up — scarce more than crumbs now. All that and the last of the rice.

“Enough for maybe two days if that’s all we’re eating.” Simra groped at the grain sack, guessing at its contents. “Longer if we’ve got things to help it go further. Not a lot longer, but longer.”

“I wasn’t able to buy a lot,” Noor said. “Some ugly roots. Dried crabmeat and smallfish dumplings, I think? Your pickled garlic . . .”

Simra looked at Noor’s offerings. “Huh. Celery root. That’ll bulk rice. Flavour it too. Nice if you’ve got oil to fry it in, which we have, or stew to stew it in, which . . . not so much. The dumplings? Boil them back to life in water and that’s a soup. Well, a soup of sorts, anyway . . .” He remembered Old Ebonheart and Caselif’s ricewater soup. Can’t just call anything ‘broth’ so long as you’ve boiled something in it. Not on the ordinary. But when starving’s at stake, the rules change. Simra’s mouth twitched, following the line of his scar right up to the edge of a nostril. A flicker that might’ve been the start of a smile he’d thought better of, or might’ve been a spark-up of anger.

“I’ll check the edges of the island,” said Tammunei. “Next low tide. Every low tide, maybe.”

“You and everyone else if things’re as bad as they might be,” said Simra. “Guess that’s one way we’ll know what to expect from this Winter. You see poor wretches scraping up barnacles for their breakfast, let me know, alright?”

“Alright.”

“I’ll try town tomorrow,” said Simra. “See what’s for sale to those who ask. Or at least see what the news is on the docks.”

Noor nodded. There was an uncertainty in her face now. Like they were moving into territory strange to her and leaving behind what she knew and knew how to live through. “That tea . . .” she said, sounding like she needed it now.

“Right,” said Simra. He walked from under the awning and into the wind to where their cairnish little hearth was. Rubbed his hands together. Asked for heat.


	55. Chapter 55

Simra padded along the dryboards that lined the way townward. Careful feet in two-toed boots, avoiding the worst of the mud. Shoulders bunched tight and back hunched over; hands crammed under his arms and wishing he had gloves.

He’d spent the morning crossing the marshes that middled the island. Burping stands of brackish water and straggles of hardy reeds. Spider-brown mushrooms with heads fronded like blowball flowers; slim-stemmed and tall as birches but flexile, bown one way then the next in the wind. No wading birds. Only sometimes a small slump of rock would move and shuffle through the muck, showing itself not a rock at all but a kind of beetle, tilling the waters for food. Only sometimes searchers out from town and the scatter of cottages across the rest of the island. With their ragged mantles and hoods and their bare black-stained legs, they trod through the waters, carrying lanterns, looking for fish, things in shells, veins of naft. Made Simra colder than he could bear just to look at them, so he tried not to. Just kept to the path through the marshlands, where stocky cairns daubed with white paint marked trails of solid ground.

Now, after the rot-sweet air of the middle marshes, came the smell of the sea. It was thicker here than up on the headland, where the air was too restive with wind to smell of anything much besides cold. With the shore in bowshot he saw it: a swash of glaucous grey, a black middle-distance and bluish horizon. Coursings of white toward the searocks that edged the bay, in waves waist-high and spitting. And Branoristown sat in the bay’s lap. The crags around, the sea beyond, the marshlands at his back — it looked paltry next to all that. Small and pitiful and desperate; an unplanned little foundling of a town.

Simra had seen once, in the fuggy marshlands south of the Deshaan and towards the Blackmarsh border, a colony of things: vermin with clammy rat-sized bodies and thick-tapering tadpole tails and stubby grippy little forelegs. Boneless, they could fit into almost anything you wanted them kept out of. Foodstores most of all. The locals would cull them, boiling water down their burrows and standing by the burrow’s escape tunnel with sticks, cudgels, bills, mattocks. It’d seemed an easy enough way to make coin, standing with them. But when the things teemed out of their colony, fleeing the steam and scald of it, they came in a clambering heaping tide, all trying to claw each over the other. A mudslide, an avalanche, but made of bodies, heaped all on all for space and safety. He’d stood ready with his cudgel till he saw them, then found he wanted none of it. Not for such a pittance of coin. In hindsight he’d’ve paid never to have seen it at all.

To him, that was how Branoristown looked to’ve been built. A slow-fought scrummage of buildings, all having chosen the same place to put their foundations. Roofs crashed into roofs likes punches. Alleyways formed where two houses refused to touch. And in the little cove where the piers reached out, the structures scrambled all up on each other, dense and mad and jealous.

In the main they seemed made from driftwood. The sodden-once sort of wood that’s been planed and planked to hull boats and come together as clinkers, and looks now swollen through the grain, and dark even when dry. Shards of it and scraps of it. Sides of it taken wholesale off from a scuppered ship, still caulked with pitch or resin. They came together, clapped into houses and shopfronts. Doors that hinged to their frames like rudders and barred with what could have been oarshafts. Struts and stilts, creaking above the baywater, with buildings balanced haphazard atop them. Boats and houseboats, at jostle for moorings. And out beyond, a ways into the deeper waters, ships at anchor. An arbour of masts.

A patchwork, Simra thought. Or a mess if you weren’t feeling kind. All that pitch and seasoned wood, and the galewinds off the ocean — it was a wildfire waiting to happen.

He walked the one street. It struck out from inland, straightish towards the jagged crescent bay, the docks. A scuttle of buildings lined it on either side and alleys broke off like the veins in a leaf. They were built for rain, built for storms, angled against the north, and f0r all they looked haphazard, they were strong at the foundations, squat-rooted to the sloping ground. Built to stand still when the earth shook beneath them. Built to stand firm and to shrug when the mainland sent ash or the ocean crashed up from the harbour and into the streets.

The boards carried on down the street’s two sides, but worn and sunk with use. Slat to slat Simra picked his way, ankles braced and stiff against the uneven footing. The street dug through town, high at its dryboarded walkways, but sloping muddy to midway like a near-dry riverbed. Trenches and pools of water and glints of mirrored sky.

A cart stood abandoned a ways ahead, buried to the axles in mud. Beyond it, stones began to litter the dirt road as it bit out towards the beach. Those that walked the streets walked fast, heads down; ducked into alleyways soon as they could, like insects back to their holes at the first show of sun.

On the far side of the street a sign clapped in the breeze above a porch that pitched over the dryboards and looked half-fit to fall into the mire of the road. A few slats of wood, painted with a pair of scales, weighing a sun and pair of moons. The picture was well done. Unexpected here, out of place, but Simra reckoned he knew a tradehouse when he saw one.

He cast up and down the street for a way over. “Blight.” He looked at the mud, down at his boots, then back. “Fucking blight . . . ”

A pair of old Dunmer sat under the tradehouse porch, sharing smokes from the same clay waterpipe. The parts of some game lay between them on a cratebuilt table. Cards or dice; board and pieces. One with a long thin chinbeard caught Simra with his eye. Looked to his friend with the kind of spendthrift gesture that comes only from long acquaintance, and then they were both looking at him. Smirking from out their deep-lined faces and peering over the mudcourse with narrow-smiling eyes, dark red and making his neck burn, his scalp prickle.

A twist of Simra’s mouth then a sharp parting as he kissed his teeth. He tramped on down the street to where the stones began. Long strides, a shame and frustratement of longstretched time, and every motion he made in it felt false and forced as he felt their eyes on his back and their quiet laughter pronging at the settle of his insides. At last he crossed where it was easier to cross, boots growling on the beachstones, then up the street again.

His face had gone to thunder by the time he was back to the tradehouse. Must have, for how their faces fell and went blank, and their eyes went back to their game.

They were playing at maze, cards facedown across the tabletop in tangling paths and dead ends. Caselif had been good at the game, same as he’d been good at most every game he turned to. Tried to teach Simra more than once, but he only ever learnt enough to know when Case was winning, and that was more from watching, game after game after game, than from any of those meandering halfhensible lessons. The second of the two had that look now. A blank comfort in his gaze and patience in the shape of his small sagdown mouth. Beyond that he was beardless and bald, and bare even of eyebrows, so he seemed two ages at once. A crag-faced sharp-nosed infant with a labyrinth of lines round his eyes.

Simra made to move past them, through the heavy curtain that covered the doorway.

“No use on that,” said the bearded one.

“Eat inkstones, can you?” said the other. “Pots and pans and wholecloth? What you’re here for, intit? Provisioning? You look the sort.”

“Sword. Boots. Jangling every step. Wear your wealth, eh? Such as it is.”

“Such as it is,” said the bald Dunmer. His smirk was returning. “No food to be asked for if that’s what you’ll ask. Not by your means . . . ”

Simra’s head turned, hard, hurting with the motion. Fuck did they know about his means? His sort or sword or boots? But he forced himself calm, dragging in a long thin breath through his flaring nostrils. Blinking once, hard, as his left hand slid down to his swordbelt and stopped incidental just over the hanger. “No food at all?”

“Not for murder nor money.”

“Pity,” said Simra. His belly clenched. It was worse than he’d thought, and sooner too. “Can still hear voices inside though. How’s that?”

“Narywhere else to be. Tell you, everything’s to a halt round here.”

“Where’s the sense working if coin won’t feed you?”

“What’s left to do?”

“Piss your coin away somewhere warm, I s’pose is the reasoning.” The bearded Dunmer took a bubbling drag from the pipe.

“Then how come you’re both out here?”

“We’re only where we always are.”

“Been famines before.”

“And there will be again.”

“No reason to change from doing what you love.”

Famine. Simra had felt the word all this time but the bearded Dunmer was the first he’d heard say it here. “Well.” He shrugged to hide the slump in his shoulders, the doomed feeling in his spine. “Drinking on an empty belly does work out cheaper . . . ” That, and there’s uses for taproom talk — small victories to suck from defeat.

He passed through the curtain and into the bodywarmth, the murmur and bellow of voices, and the sourness of worried sweat.

 

“Good preparation, probably,” he said, back encamped that evening and on his way back to sober. “Gets us in the spirit. It’ll be worse on Vvardenfell.”

“What will be?”

He shrugged. “The cold maybe. The hunger for certain. The exposure and unrest and sense of nothing coming along quite right. Everything struggling along like no-one knows what they’re doing. Suffering along in the shadow of no-one having enough of anything. Whole island made of too many mouths and too many bellies and too many greedy hands, and little enough to fill any of them.”

“The plain’s no different,” said Noor.

“Nor any other wild place in the world maybe,” said Tammunei.

“Nah. There’s differences. People don’t crowd to the plain expecting to find anything but grass, grazing. Vereansu if they’re unlucky; freedom if they’re Vereansu. But Vvardenfell—? Fuck . . . I’d ask what rock you’ve been living under if I didn’t already know.”

Noor frowned and crossed her arms.

Simra kissed his teeth. Still the faintest slur in his voice when he spoke at length. “Glass. That’s part of it. Red Mountain splits open, bleeds ebony, spits trueglass every which way. People’re mad enough for it on the mainland, but on Vvardenfell it’s a fucking disease. Reckon the why of it’s simple though. There’s just more of it there. In the dirt, in the rivers, in seams and filled foyadas. Just . . . imagine a place coin grows from the ground but nothing else will. And the Houses peddle it as free land for settlers. Reclaimers, they say. Rich with opportunity, all that shit. But you find soon enough you can’t eat opportunity — or glass, or ebony either.”

“You asked me before,” said Tammunei. “Long before, it seems. You asked me if Morrowind is getting better. Healing.” They tailed into a wordless question.

“Right. Right . . . ” Simra tried not to falter; flush like he’d been caught out in something. “I asked because I’d seen one of the answers. Vvardenfell’s what happens if the answer’s no. Hunger and hopeless hope, and the things they do to people, and that people do to people because of them.”

“Ah.” Tammunei’s face broke a little, conflicting itself in two pieces. Understanding and wishing they didn’t, or had, long ago, earlier. A twitch in their mouth like they wanted to say more.

“It’s bad there. People too. I’d like to put a fair face on it, but I don’t want you thinking elsewise so I reckon it’s best I’m clear now. What’s it you said about reasons, Noor?”

“The right reason’s the one that moves you.”

“Right. I just . . . I wanted to give you your chances to get your reasons straight.”

Tammunei’s voice was smaller now when they spoke. “And what about yours, Simra? You’ve seen it. Why go back?”

Simra’s face shifted. A sharp twitch down its left side, stopping sudden at the knot and stubbornness of scars near his mouth. He forced it into a lopsided smile. “You know my reasons.”

“Grazelands,” said Noor. “Ghosts. That bag you carry in your bags. Bones, is it?”

“Teeth,” said Tammunei.

Simra frowned. “You could tell?”

Tammunei dipped their chin. A lingering nod. Of course they could tell.

“Well then,” he said. “Grazelands, ghosts, and a bag of rattling teeth. Sentiment.” He pulled a long mock of a smile. “Straight enough for you?”


	56. Chapter 56

The combing of the beaches had begun. Silhouettes appeared at dawn, searching the swash, the stones, the silt left behind in the shrinking tide. Hunched and almost half-starved – you could tell even from a distance – they put out traps and stalked for mussels, inner sea oysters, scorpionfish in the shallows.

Hunger and waiting drive the mind in strange directions, Simra reckoned. They drive potters and scriveners and sailors to the seashore, looking for anything eatworthy. And they drove Simra to wondering: how long before they turn to the rocks with blunt knives and start scraping for barnacles and limpets?

He and Tammunei were ahead of them. Not scraping the rocks yet, but hunting amongst them.

Tammunei had worked the sea for days now. Out in the dawn and again with the sunrise to come back dripping and saltlicked, crystalled with borrows of brine. And all but every time they returned with something for the pot, for the hotrocks they cooked over. Things in shells. Things with blue-black spiderlegs to break open and suck out the meat. Oysters sometimes. Simra had longback grown to like those well enough, but these ones went down cold and unseasoned. No black vinegar, no sprinkle of dried black lime — they felt less like food and more like swallowing a sneeze. Their shells clacked outside their camp in heaps, like the cairns that led through the saltmarshes below.

It was better than an empty belly. At least for the the most part, Simra reckoned. Hard to tell sometimes between hunger pangs and the ordinary upset to his stomach of eating near-nothing but flesh for too long. A monotony of seameats broken up only by kelp and seaweeds. Windhelm had got him used to hunger; Morrowind, to sating it on strange things pried from their shells. He only worried how long it could carry on. With all the island turning to the shores and plying the waters, maybe not so much longer. Not the whole Winter long, that was sure as sunrise.

Evening and Tammunei was in the water. A grey limb or flash of red hair sometimes, darked with wet, above the lapping waves. Sunset presiding. Gleams of burnt orange and sparks of yellow floated like oil on the ocean.

Simra stayed dry on the rocks by the water, but found it hard not to watch for Tammunei. Not for the eye-blink suggestions of skin. Just for the fret of it. A pain, almost, behind the eyes. The water was cold and the tides on the inner sea fickle. It wasn’t the sudden dim flame of their hair he watched for, but its absence. An idiot thing – what would you do to stop the sea taking them, even if you saw it happen? – but he was helpless not to feel it. Was this how his mother had felt, watching him learn to swim as they travelled up the Darkwater and back to Windhelm? Perhaps not.

He looked at what Tammunei had left behind instead. A blue-grey coat and stout heavy hide boots, and wool stockings stuffed into the bootmouths like gags. How Tammunei didn’t freeze to death went beyond Simra’s knowledge of magic or alchemy to answer. He only trusted that they wouldn’t. That whatever they’d slathered on before swimming would hold: some kind of yellow wax, warmed to melting in a little jug of beaten copper.

Simra had his own role to play, his own work to do, and he focused on that best he could. Tammunei worked the deeps, and Simra picked over the shallows of the seacliffs, the craggy edges of the water, and the heights that reached above them. Those were the duties he’d slipped into. Rockpools and racernests, and the clutches of small scuttling things that clanned amongst the stones and creased cliff-faces but slipped into the water at night to feed. Tammunei had done their best to teach him how to hunt over each.

Crouching at the side of a pool, Simra watched the weeds for bubbles. The wind ached in his ears. What seaspray had crested up onto him was determined not to dry. Shrimp came and went. Sometimes a bigger seashalk or crab worried at the greengrowth. Tammunei had taught him charms to bring them to the surface – shrimp and smallfry and weavercrabs – but doing it tired him. Made his mind feel sluggish and cold, like reaching it into the water to come up drenched and frozen. Better to save his strength for a fire later. Warm stones to welcome Tammunei back from the water. Better now to watch for prey he could catch with his hands and a knife.

Soon he went back to the picking basket they shared. Wicker and small, it fit their expectations. A flabby and frill-headed black fish stared up one-eyed from its bottom as Simra threw in a pair of scrollcase clams, shells long and black and closed in brainless fright. They lay nestled after that on a glistening tangle of sea-oak, rust-coloured and cold from the ocean.

“Silt here!” Tammunei called from the water. A thin voice behind tight-grit teeth.

“Yeah?” Squat beside the basket, Simra looked and found their head above the waves. “How deep?”

“Oysters maybe,” Tammunei said, like that was an answer.

“Again?”

Tammunei just bowed their head like they were staring at something beneath the surface, their expression clenched into a thoughtful grimace. Then with a cheek-swelling breath they sank. Simra clenched his jaw and told his heart not to lurch. Tammunei’s head broke the water again, masked in a slick cling of hair.

“Here!” they gasped. Threw an oyster deftless onto the rocks near the basket.

Simra sighed through his nose and plucked up the shell, big across as his hands side by side. The pickings for oysters were good off Branoris where there were pickings at all. Left alone in the Red Year’s wake, the shellfish were well-grown and the hunger of people was scarce still catching up to their numbers. How much longer would that last at this rate? How long does it take for an oyster to grow to a size where you’d want to eat it? He dropped this small giant into the basket and moved the whole thing closer to the water’s edge.

“Easier next time,” he muttered. But it was only to the water itself. Tammunei was gone again.

Turning, Simra backed towards the cliffs. The evening was numbing-cold but there was no rain, little frost. A decent night for climbing. He breathed a magelight to life inside his hands and sent it red along the rockface till he found the outcrop he was looking for.

A stand of stone a short way from the main front of cliffs, like a tower outside a town’s walls. From its top a spur of rock yearned back to landward, like a bridge that had spanned the gap once, but since gone to ruin. Red Year, he wondered, or just time? How long does a thing like that take?

“Not that it matters,” he muttered.

He’d seen racers landing at the top of this stand when the light had been stronger that morning. Back then the tide had moated round it on every side, rushing faster than he’d want to brave swimming through for just the glimmering possibility of eggs. But climbing now, in the dry, for that same possibility — those were odds he liked better.

By the frowning light of his cantrip, he squinted and planned a path up. No overhangs, and the way was far from sheer. No trouble. He brought his hands out from under his mantle and into the cold again. Breathed hot over them, warming them, and flexed the fingers. Then he tossed the mantle back over his shoulders and out of his way. Bracing his left grip against the first handhold, Simra began to climb.

Palms raw, fingers stiff and with feeling long since fled from them, the nest was empty when he found it. A hollow bowl of dried seaweed and the paper-grey mortar racers disgorged from their craws to shore up the sides of their homes. Nothing inside but a black-glinting arrowhead, a scrap of yellow-painted wood, and a few smooth pale skimstones, one scratched at one time with a ‘neht’.

“Godshit,” Simra breathed. He looked from the nest to his boots. The leather shinfronts, up into the quilted leather kneepads were scuffed pale and scratched. “Cut out my tongue and break my teeth!” he cursed. “Godshit and blindness . . . Not ruined but fucking close to it.”

His mouth twisted. His brows knit tight. With a furious jerk of motion he stooped towards the nest. Reached out, pinched up the arrowhead, and pocketed it into his jacket. Ebony, looked like, or at least some other low obsidian. Worth more than nothing, at the least.

“Snatch such victory as you can from defeat . . .” he muttered.

“Some things remain, I see.”

Simra flinched and all but fell, onto his arse or off the clifftop, in his scrabble to pull a knife. He came up on a knee and a brace-bent leg. In his hand, the wicked-skinny filleting blade that hung as part of a pair, panniered beneath his sword.

“You, despite your sparsity of years, Simra Hishkari, are ever a one unsubject to change.”

Last flash of sunset over the ocean. Last lingering blush in the sky. The same voice. Not one he recognised, but it seemed to know him. Male, rough extremity of an accent; barely Morrowind, barely modern. Words like it was reading, rehearsing.

Simra snarled into the fading light, willing his narrowed eyes to adjust. He passed the knife from offhand to his right.

Scarce more than three paces from one end of this cropping to the other and they shared it now. The figure was close. He was tall, clothed in a slope-shouldered mantle of swooping panes, cloth embroidered and creased like the veins in a mothwing. High collar and a broad bead-dripping headdress that veiled down to cover the face — all of it but the mouth, which was thin-lipped and stained a faint black. Not dressed for the weather, that was for sure. Through the shifting purple-grey of the veil, Simra felt eyes on him.

“Fuck are you?” Simra spat. “Or, fuck that, who am I, since you seem to know so well.”

The stranger said nothing. Not even a twist to his mouth.

“Go on. If you came up here meaning me danger you’d’ve pushed already. You wanna tell me about me instead? Be my fucking guest.” Simra made a show of moving into a more comfortable crouch, elbows on knees and looking up. The knife stayed in his hand, not that he reckoned it would be of any use here.

“Ever you were a one who would thrust their hand into a gutter, into the mire, past the elbow, and all to fish up a coin you saw glinting there. It is useful to see that has not changed, but in this regard you are not a thing unique. Particular to you, Simra Hishkari, you will look on the smirch of your hand and, with a quirk in your mouth, spout booklearning to yourself. Who was it? Arctus? No, only one of his later bootlickers. One who hopbacked to pen-fame over his grave. Hierocrantus. You quote as if, by so doing, your actions are lent dignity, no matter their lowness.”

“Dignity?” Simra gave a small flourish of his left hand, demonstrating the squat he sat in. “I’m ever the picture of it.”

Simra hissed a laugh through his nose and the breath fogged the air. No fog from the mouth in that veiled face, though. He dropped his eyes to the stranger’s feet. Slippers almost, in lustrous yellow, at least in their upper face, but they pointed down into cloven platforms, one at the heel and one at the toe, like walking on a crab’s claws.

“You’re not real, are you?” Simra said, coming slow to his feet. “Not here. No chance you’re even standing here in those.” He jerked his head, nodding at the shoes, then reached out a deliberate hand till it met the front of the stranger’s mantle. His fingertips passed straight through. Nothing to mark the motion but a warmth, a faint buzzing beneath his skin. A kind of palpable silence. “How’re you doing that? Wait, don’t tell me. You’re a sending. Question is, who sent you?”

The slightest fall turned the sending’s mouth sour. When it spoke again, its voice was strident, proud as only wounded pride can be. “The household Ulessen of the Great House Telvanni has a message meant for you.”

“Go on.” Simra crossed his arms, keeping them in from the cold. He shifted his weight to one hip.

“The Tel. Tomorrow. You are expected. Provisions will be made for your crossing. That is all.”

“That’s all?”

The mouth twitched. Opened. Shut. Like the sending wanted to say more but had no more words — only air, and the black show of teeth. “That is all.”

After that, the sending was gone. The sound of the sea resumed. Simra hadn’t realised it had stopped. Only when the silence broke did he realise how total it had been, leaving nothing but the sending’s voice and his own. And where before the sky had been frozen in the last pink glaze of sunset, now that was gone without transition. Blinked out. Night had fallen as if in Simra’s absence. He had been somewhere else; some other version of here.


	57. Chapter 57

Next day, the island’s middle slouched wide ahead and out to either side of him. Glint of morning gold in its glass-dark pools and mudslicks as Simra walked the cairnways through the marsh. Over spines of solid stone and spits of sod. Past bracks of burping water, filmy as if with oil and smelling immix and unsimple. Like a camp of soldiers the morning after lining up at a cauldron of cabbage soup, but stony, metallic too, with a spike to the scent that went straight through the nose to the root of your brain. Ancient rot and stone and rain. That was naft, in clots and seams beneath the water.

A hunched figure in a spattered cloak worked in the distance, calf-deep amongst the shallows, putting down stakes, poles like beans would climb up. They were trying to plant a garden. Stretch desperation thin enough and you see the hopelessness behind it. A striving pleading something, anything-taking, anything-doing, all-capable and doomed. Simra didn’t know of any edible plant that’d grow quicker than a person would starve. Not here. Not here for certain.

He saw no one else. Only circling racers and scudding clouds in a cold and paint-blue sky.

He’d told the others where he was headed. The sending didn’t say to come alone but Simra told them it had. The Tel, tomorrow; you’re expected; come unaccompanied. He told them over another pot of seashore stew: a motley of clams and oysters and shallows-skulking fish. Strands and branches of sea oak adrifted the broth. Kelp too that Noor had dried in the sun, distrust in her face in-fighting with a nomad pragmatism. Simra ate it like always, dreaming of noodles, dumplings — potatoes even, or the white Winter dirt-yams of home.

What do the Tel-dwellers want with you? Noor had asked. Fucked if I know. More curious about how they knew to find me. Have you treated with them in the past? she said. Not these ones. Not here. But he’d treated with the House, he said, in a way. Me and a couple of them, he said, a couple of times. Service for service. But that didn’t explain why this one – Ulessen – knew him. Didn’t think the Telvanni talked amongst themselves much, he said. Every household an island. All that. Given the right reason, Noor said, any habit is worth breaking.

She’d been too curious. He’d tried not to lie outright. Was trying to be better; or trying to try. But she had a thousand and one questions about the Telvanni. Where he didn’t have an answer, she all but begged him to come back with one. Promise me? He’d never heard her say that before, or sound so thin and hopeful. And for all her questions briared at him, Simra was curious too. Would’ve liked answers to all her questions, whether she’d asked them or not. That was the rub. The sending spoke like it knew him — or knew enough to presume to know him, much as he’d snarl and scoff back.

Simra sniffed. His throat was thick, the back shelves of his nose half-blocked. Not damplung or the first stirrings of a fever, but the cold had put a chill in his breathing now. Another blighted thing to suffer through.

With no dry way to cross to the next white-painted cairn, he trudged careful through a short ford of shallow water. The sound of his boots slapped wet as he came between rushes and reeds and up onto another rising patch of rock. Feet dry, he thought. Give thanks for small things.

A mer sat against the cairn that topped this small rise. His chin and jaw hung the sort of beard that grows longer than it does thick. Tufty grey hair grew at his temples and the back of his head, resined up and forward to hover, a crest, above his bald pate. A long-bladed spear leaned to one side of him, a brown lacework tassel tied just below its single-edged head. He was hassocked and shawled in apple-yellow and cloth the colours of leather, root patterns broidered in white on the sleeves. He got to his feet, pulling himself up by the shaft of the spear. Click and scrape of armour beneath the drape of his clothes.

“You Hishkari?” His voice grated. Age and ash and saltspray.

“I am.”

He nodded, mouth downturned and grim. “Sent to meet you.”

“Nice to have a reception.”

“Tis, is it?” The retainer stooped again, making a wet grunt in his throat as he bent, and picked up a helmet from where he’d sat. “Aye. Aye, aye, suppose it would be . . .” The helm went down and hid his face. Its shape was irregular, wrought from dark iron, borrowing from mushroomcaps, oyster shells, an anvil looking straight at you. Slits on its two-planed face to breathe and see through, and a hood of purple-grey netch leather to cover the skullback, neck, and shoulders. “You’re to come with me.”

Simra followed as the retainer turned and set a trudging pace across the rise. The ground grew waterlogged again and the going was slow. Then without warning the earth parched out and turned all to grinding slates, rising dust with their footfalls. A ribbon of sea broke across the way ahead of them, dividing Branoris proper from the smaller island of the Tel.

Cliffs rose sheer up on the water’s far side, maybe four men high. The sea itself was fast here, racing with the tide through the narrow channel. Beyond it, and above the cliffs, a vast parasol mushroom loomed, proud and strong from a distance, but look closer and it was cracked, daylight cleaving down in places, into the shade it cast. Sections of its span had broken away and sections had grown new, crusting out, glinting like they were moist. Branches and shelves of fungus, out from its thick central stem. There was no sign of a boat or mooring on this side or the other.

Simra blinked and squinted up at the Tel. The air beneath it was fogged, granular. Spores, let out for repair and regrowth. He lifted a hand and plucked at the folds of his patchwork scarf. Sore and difficult, he cleared his throat in a pair of small hacks. As if it didn’t have enough to contend with, chill and cough and all, of course he had to come through a spore-shower too.

The retainer looked back. Put a hand into a small satchel tied to his sash. It came out holding a bottle. Blue-green glass, its texture dusty and pitted, imperfect. He pulled out the cram of corkbulb that stoppered its mouth, held it up to the pale and distant sun to gauge the amount, then drank. “Other half’s for you,” he said, handing the bottle to Simra.

Simra sniffed at the bottlemouth. Safe, like as not – the retainer drank first – but when did that ever stop curiosity? Or suspicion. “Trama?” he asked.

The retainer shrugged. “Didn’t make it.”

“But it’s to get us over?”

“What else’d it be for?” The tone was graphic. Simra could imagine the scorning face that went with it, even through the helmet.

“You always drink what a stranger tells you to? Pardon me for being f— . . . for being careful.” Simra tipped the rest of the bottle into his mouth. A syrup-thick fluid, strange in its lightness. Unpleasant in the way he reckoned it must be to drink the beaten whites of eggs by the cupful. “‘Provisions will be made.’ That’s what I got told. Guessing this is them?” He handed the empty bottle back to the retainer.

Stowing the empty bottle back where it had come from, the retainer gave another shrug, and pushed against the ground with the butt of his spear. “Aye,” he said. His boots were off the ground. He was hanging above it. Hovering.

“Course,” Simra muttered. A tingling had started, needles and pins, in his elbows and shoulders, fingers and palms and the arches of his feet. A numb absent feeling took hold in his belly.

Like a gondolier fending off from shore, the retainer nudged with the shaft of his spear and drifted forward. A shadow over the water; a careful arc through the thin cold air.

Simra planted his feet, chewing at his lower lip. “Course. No one hates stairs like a fucking Telvanni. Fucking of course they hate boats too. Fuck.”

He tried to gauge the distance. Already the guard had traced more than half of a smooth rising path, across the channel and to the clifftop. Well-practiced. Probably even liked the potion’s taste by now. For Simra’s part, he’d done this less than a handful of times, and in Sadrith Mora, the only course to plot had been up.

A running jump would throw him across, he reckoned. Crash him into the cliff, even. Too much less than that and he’d drift or come to a halt till the potion wore off and he dropped into the water below. Simra frowned, gathering his courage, then let annoyance prod him into motion. He stepped back. Took three purposeful strides, and each one was lighter and stranger than the last. On the final stride he pressed with the ball of his foot and sprang away from the ground.

As in Sadrith Mora, so too now. Hard to say if he hated or loved it more. Flight, or something like it, with all the heartmouthed breathless dread of it, and all the aching joy. He was moving fast, gaining speed, letting the water pass by under him as he sailed through the air. The retainer had just alighted on the clifftop. Already Simra was almost there, gliding and wind combing back his hair, eyes starting now to stream. He fought to keep them open. Grit his teeth as his vision blurred and the difference between missing and landing became a matter of two shades of black: the cliff and the ground just beyond.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck . . !” It started out as a mutter, turned wailing, then cracked into a wordless hiss when Simra missed the cliff’s hard lip and drifted past. “Crowshit!” He twisted in the air, curling foetal then ending with his head upsidedown and snarling as the ground slipped away and his stomach lurched.

Something thrust into his smarting vision. A bar of solid colour and a flicker of brown. He reached out with clawing needful hands and felt the spearshaft slip then catch between his fingers. Disinterested as a fishermer, bringing in a net to find it half-empty save minnows and tiny pointless intricate little crabs, the retainer pulled Simra back onto solid ground.

“First time?”

Simra sat, slumped and panting, knuckling at his eyes. He shook his head. Stray hairs stuck to his wet cheeks, and between his eyelids and brows.

“Well then.”

“Well then fucking what?” The colour was hot in Simra’s cheeks, and swathed across his broken nose. He scowled at the ground. A shale of shardments and cracked slate, whitechased where stone had scratched on stone.

“Fancy that, that’s all.” The retainer’s voice was drab as ever.

“‘Fancy that’?” Simra said, incredulous. “How many times does it take till that’s normal? How many more till it’s fucking boring?”

The retainer shrugged again. “Come now. Easier up to the Tel, I promise.”

“Straight up?”

“Aye.”

“Easier . . .” Simra picked himself up. Scuffed his hands against each other to dust them a shade or two cleaner. “Just gotta remember how to walk first.”


	58. Chapter 58

The island edged like an ill-made bowl around the Tel itself. Cradled in a crescent of rocky highlands, the settlement started low between them. But in stems and shelves, pods and growths in the colours of liver and dust, it overgrew them. A blot against the sky, a lake of shade below, it strained skyward in difficult shapes, twisting round itself. With every new bend of its form, a rule of architecture broken like it had never been at all.

Simra stared at it as he walked, and tried to make sense of what he saw. Branches and towers that bulged at their tops like onions, like orchids, and tapered to sky-aspiring prongs. Lamps in reds and blues and floating motes of yellow. Through a haze of sporefall he stared like someone starving. A curiosity like lust, eclipsing the mind.

He stumbled, not watching his feet. Stubbed the two-split toe of his boot into a crease in the rock. Swore – “Crowshit!” – lunging out the other leg to catch himself. Teeth peeled, he came back to the here and now. The potion was still on him, in him. Trip to the point where both feet left the ground and who’s to say he wouldn’t float. Have a fucking care.

The retainer went ahead, giving Simra the silent back of his helmet all the while. A cowl of purplish leather – netch maybe – that caped and tapered down between his hassocked shoulders. He walked like he knew the way. Not far, he’d said, but that was a half-hour’s hike ago. A ragged and indirect route, with no path, no trail, across a slow upsloping of rugged ground.

Simra had stopped believing there was even a way to know. Just what the eye could see and where the feet could go. Seeing the Tel as they crawled upland towards it did nothing for his patience.

Scrags of brush hedged the way, dry scrub in the island’s seams. Ditches, trenches, cracks. It could all sink into the sea for all the care he had of it, Simra reckoned. Bastard things, broken land, thinks to skirt and detour round. But stranger things grew here too. Fangs of stone probed up in places, tall as a man and jutting out to sea. Their sides were even and glossy, like stone burnt half to glass and reset. Veins riddled them, the colour of rust. He was put in mind of things – jugs and urns – shattered once and repaired with resins, metals, that sealed and filled the cracks. A peasant pastime in peasant places and born from thrift and need, but in Narsis he’d seen the same crafts sold not for iron but trueglass, to rich merchants, outlanders thinking memories or culture are things you can buy. These standing stones had that same shattered and mended look to them, but like the cracks were full of clay, or weather-tawnied iron.

“Those things,” said Simra as they passed another standing stone. “What are they?” Answers came uneasy from this retainer. Cagey or stupid, it was hard to tell, but Simra didn’t expect much from him. Sooner get salt back from soup, he thought, but that was no reason not to ask.

The retainer gave a groan that became a grumble. Like it pained his joints to remember how to speak. “Protection.”

Simra turned as they passed another. He wasn’t staring at the Tel any longer. His neck cricked to keep eyes on the stone. He shuffled backwards a few short steps, still facing it, then pulled away to walk on. That was the fourth he’d seen. There was a rhythm to them, he was starting to think. A regularity to the distance between them, like fenceposts or something planted.

“Protection against what? They’re magic – right? – but what kind? Fending off what, in what way?”

“Just protection. What we got told.”

“The Tel, you mean? When you say ‘we’?”

“Household, aye. That’s what he tells us. The Mouth. ‘For your own good,’ he says. ‘Your own and the good of us all.’ I trust to that.” A brief gape of silence. “I do.”

The roots came first. First part of the Tel to come in range of touch. Long searchers, they spread out from the towers two stonesthrow, maybe more. Simra reached out with his boot, a searching nudge, and tested the feeling of one. Just like he remembered, textured like something between bark and coarse rope, brown and grey and mottled with blue. Closer in their numbers grew and the size of the roots grew too. Thick as your thigh, the youngest shoots that lay webbed along the ground, but some were wider still. Broad as two folk lying head to toe, the old-growth roots writhed across the poor ground; broke the stone where they anchored down into it.

A ripple of well-worn stairs were carved down the side of one big root. Gutterlike, a channel was cut from its topside, running a causeway deeper into Tel Branora. It felt like an afterthought though, from someone who’d never have to walk it themself. Path too smooth to make for good footing; course too steep for easy walking. Pitons appeared after a time, stuck arm-long into one side, running the length of the rootway with knotted rope spooled between them. A kind of coping, Simra thought, for the people who did have to travel this way. He grudged one hand out from its opposite elbow and into the cold to grip the rope. Its feel was waxy, gumlike and giving. He gripped with his boot-toes, dug with his heels, and half-walked half-climbed forward. Almost a kind of drunkenness, the way it forced him to think out every step.

They drew past caps that clustered hutlike near to the ground and off from the paths. Mushrooms hollowed for houses and workshops brushed up against thin shells of dun plaster, shacks of piled stones and mud for mortar. Domed mushroom roofs eaved over all of them; carved eyelet windows full of runny glass the colours of deep lakewater. Overhead, the Tel knotted and matted over itself, a thatch of spires and branches, and the daylight by now was scarce. It came only in dapples and lances, fighting through holes in the tangle.

Closer now, close enough, Simra saw something new, hid till now in distance and clouds of spores. The Tel was a composite. Its heart wasn’t the towering central parasol, its stem and wide gills. That was something grown around the heart. Structures of stone showed out from the fungus, hugged and entwined, half-eaten. Like a tree twists itself round the post staked down to support the shoot it once was; swallows it, smothers it, in young green wood and infinite patience. Like bones show through something starving, or in the last stages of rot.

The central parasol’s stem coiled and swelled round a tall stone tower. Others surrounded in scatters amongst the branches, roots, and stems. Subtowers long since overcome. But even the stone they were built on seemed less constructed than sprouted; not cut to blocks or built from bricks but moulded, extruded, like things shaped from warm wax. Like the standing stones before.

It was wilder than Sadrith Mora. Sadrith Mora felt yoked, prudent, designed by a mind with living in mind. Simra knew little of the Telvanni. More than many but far less than a lot. Just enough that the feeling he had was familiar. The common impression across all great Telvanni works: amazement, yes, at what’s been wrought, but a strong sense it should never have been.

His mouth was dry now. His eyes felt thick and rheumy, his throat itching just where cough and tongue couldn’t reach. Maybe that was why they kept darkness down here, to put the spores out of sight and mind. Shame it didn’t keep them from mouth and nose too.

The rootway evened out, not sloping now. The retainer led off down another flight of steps and onto the ground, gridded with blue-black tiles and grown with beds of yellowish moss. A womer hunchbacked a basket of spindly dried roots into a doorway and stopped to sweat and rest. Off from one of the pathways, where a small grove formed between a subtower and the clustering housecells at its feet, a mer was selling something from a lean-to stall. Talking in a quiet burr to a customer, he dipped a stick made gummy with something – molten sugar or resin – into a tight-stoppered urn to pull out a fidgetting bolus of insects, then clapped the lid back on his jar. Sound of iron, copper and brass, as he wrapped the ball in paper and took coins in return. There were no more customers waiting.

Simra clenched his right hand and crossed his other arm over it. Hid it in the crook of his elbow; the belled sleeve of his sister’s jacket. A worry had grown in his stomach. So close now to finding out what had brought him here, but he found he’d sooner not know. Delay, run away. This didn’t feel good, didn’t feel like it could end well however you sliced the issue or sussed the outcome. A Telvanni summons you — what’s stupider, to ignore or to answer?

“Quick now,” the retainer grunted. He’d stopped, fixed Simra with a backward glance of his blank helmet-face. “Got another rise to go yet. Up into the tower. Potion won’t hold forever.”

Maybe there was an urgency, an anxiousness, in the shape of the older mer’s shoulders, the lean of his back. No salve to the nerves, that, but still Simra followed. Past alleygroves and lamplit walled off hollows where fruits and flowers grew in shelfbeds, and climbing vines clung to pillars whose surfaces ran like wax. Past locked gates of twined and painted wood, hung with charms and glinting bells that buzzed as Simra drew close.

In the shade and tangled streets of the Tel it was hard to keep your place. Simra looked up half the time, trying to see what he could of the upper levels, and like as not that didn’t help. When at last they came to the great parasol, it surged up in front as if from nothing.

A vast bole and heavy limbs, its stem thrust skyward from a cramped and crowded plaza. Roots, thick as a hard-to-climb wall is high, portioned off the space and cut the plaza in quarters. Tunnels bored through in places, leading from one to the next. Between them, beggars begged and traders traded.

Scrolls, bunched herbs, reagents by weight and by volume, to the tune of moving money and teetering scales. Books, bags, optics of resin and glass for seeing the unseen, or saving the eyes from light, from heat, from gasses and worse. Headsacks and breathbags for dangerous work; bottles and jars and ores. Shining-shelled beetles leashed on thin silk. This was where the commoners and the lower Telvanni – runners, apprentices, lowborn or young or still learning – crashed together, in sight of the tower.

Even here, at the enclave’s bustling heart, the crowds were dense, not numerous. The margin roots and tight plaza gave that illusion, but this place was no town. Not even a village, in truth, and more than half empty till now.

Still, chasing the retainer’s hassocked back through the dozen-strong, ten-strong crowds, Simra felt an old instinct. To reach out, grab the retainer’s mantle, his robe, and be pulled through in his wake. That’d been his way with Soraya as a child. She’d pull him through the packed Kingsway, his knuckles white with fear of losing her, or fear of being lost. He coughed now and swallowed, like that would bury the feeling. Gave himself to a newer instinct instead, left hand on the hilt of his sword, right hand into his jacket till he felt the secret thick-lined pocket and the razor there. His elbow crooked in to hug the straps of his bags to his body.

They came to the tower’s base. Simra edged into it, leaned with one shoulder and let down the hand from his sword to trace the stem’s texture in secret curiosity. He looked at the retainer. Tried not to show his jangling nerves or sharp curiosity. “What now?”

The retainer leaned on his spear and jerked the gaze of his helmet upwards. “See?”

The towerstem let out into a kind of shelf, hollow and open on its underside. It let into a dark space, lit dim with lamps of red glass. A doorway, but on the wrong plane, maybe thirty strides up from the ground.

Simra raised his eyebrows. Raised a hand and scratched at the corner of one with a white-scarred finger and a short grey nail. “Just up then? Simple.”


	59. Chapter 59

The chamber was small and bare. Its domed ceiling arched down seamless to become walls, all daubed in toolmarked pearl-grey plaster. At Simra’s back the door was closed. A retainer stood by it, breathing heavy through the gilled blank face of his helmet. In one hand, a lacquered wood scrollcase. His other dandled the hilt of a shortsword, sheathed where it hung at his belt.

Ahead a screen spanned off half the room. Stretched silk on a black iron frame, embroidered with sinuous curls of thread and precise-dyed snarls of mute colour. Cyan, russet, dragonfly-green, on a field of parchment yellow. But the stitching was not simple needlework, unders and overs. It was hatched and knotty somehow. Frowning and craning his neck to it, Simra realised that every measure of the work was sigils and signs, letters and symbols, compounding to make up the pattern.

There’d been silence ever since he entered. An age ago that seemed now. The moments stretched out the way thick and tedious quiet stretches time on into infinity, everyone waiting for it to end. Just the raspy-breathing guard, and sounds from behind the screen. The sounds were of lips and teeth. A gutter-deep slurp of soup or tea; the clatter of clay and thick glass. Not eating but feasting.

That was Ulessen, hidden but heard. So much for hospitality, Simra thought, anger and envy tumbling like dice in his mind. He’d had more ceremony from petty kinlords in backwater holdings, or as a guest of the Weeping-Clouds at their hall in the Rift. Mistress Ulessen made no shows of power or station. It was enough that she had the Tel; that she ate while he went empty, and the island outside the Tel scraped and starved.

The Mouth jerked up. Simra shuffled back a step, reweighting his stance at the suddenness of it. Then the Mouth’s body went tight, like a sail filling sudden with wind. His shoulders slackened down and his mouth hung wide. Black teeth, black tongue, shining like wet ink.

“Still an ender, are you not?” The voice was blunt and raw with its words. Gone the veneer and windy formality of the Mouth himself when they’d spoken before by the sea. Its tone was twofold. Female bled through the male like an echo, ancient and rasping and dry. Ulessen, cutting straight to the matter of things. “Certainly you are, else you needs must have starved, ha? How else would a one such as you stay fed save murder?”

The Mouth’s jaw moved puppetish now, in spasms and clatters of teeth. Was she watching through his veiled eyes, or somehow from behind the screen? Could she see him at all, Simra wondered. He dared a glance at the screen, half-expecting to feel eyes meeting his.

“Look at me when I speak!” Mistress Ulessen said. The Mouth hunched and swayed with the force of it. “Would you be so good as to look?”

Simra’s teeth grit as he forced a smile. Looked back to the Mouth, quick as flinching. “Kena Ulessen . . ?” he simpered. But words boiled behind his brow. He had been looking at her, till she told him look away. Not at the body she wore so she could speak with her mouth full. At her, behind her blighted screen. “Please,” he said. “You have my whole attention.”

“Ha! Courtesy, and yet I ought to have expected none. Do we teach the nix to read and expect it to stack our books? No, it is a tool set in its purpose. Such a thing are you, ha? Am I wrong?”

Simra’s tight smile broke and his mouth opened again to answer.

“Do not tell me if I am! I shall not be told, in mine own tower, and by such as you, ‘Mistress Ulessen, you are mistaken.’ By such as you . . . A broken instrument. Only leave, ha? I shall have no use of you then.”

The echo became a shriek behind the Mouth’s even tones. A shudder went through it as Simra watched, like the body’s buried soul trying to break through the will that had smothered it.

Simra breathed deep through his nose. Cool air, dry as bones and so clean it tasted barren. Only some malten earthy scent from behind the screen. A sourness too, like sweat. His or hers, he wondered. Felt a drop itch cold down his spine. He forced himself to look at the Mouth, counting and cataloguing to calm himself, his temper and nerves. Yesterday, the Mouth’s headdress had sparred out to either side and dripped with strings of beads. Today’s was a wrapped hood of stiff burnt-orange that rose to a layered peak. A halo of brass wires spread from its sides, like the splay of quills in a bird’s fanned tail, coiling and testing the air like antenna. But the veil of knotty lace that covered the whole of his face, all but his moving lips — that was still the same. Simra found himself searching out the eyes behind it.

“May I please speak?” he asked, head bowed.

“That is what I asked, did I not? Do I speak to a dolt? A total lackwit, ha?”

One more laugh like that and he swore he would scream. He was starting to hate it, deep and keen as if he’d hated it all his life. One coughing syllable, inane as barking; marking questions and wanting answers to none. He chewed the inside of his cheek till he felt it almost give between his teeth. “What use is it you’d make of me?”

“There is someone I would have killed.”

Simra didn’t know what else he’d expected. Something stranger perhaps. The curiosity he’d brought with him came back. A small spur of it, buried till now in disquiet, twitched his eyes wide and back up. “Something so simple? I’d’ve thought . . .”

“Speak. Why do you stop? Speak!”

“It’s nothing, kena. Only . . . If it’s someone’s death you want, I’m sure you’ve got simpler ways. Your power, your influence . . .”

“Would you deny me!?” Another shriek from somewhere beyond the Mouth’s slack throat. A hiss that came from the air, like something on the brink of boiling. “Would you tell me I am mistaken? You dare!”

“Only way I can think you’d need help is if the – ah – the object of your attentions is past your reach.” Simra spoke so fast his breath ran short. A knot had formed painful under his jaw, heart throwing itself at his ribs. “Which case, I’m sure I’m no use to—”

“I am no fool, child! I have played this game since you were a grub, an egg, a spurt of filth. Any fool old wizard may see a problem, turn first to magic to solve it today and spawn six more problems for tomorrow. But I . . . am . . . no fool! I use what tools are in my hands, however crude. That is, if they are fit to purpose.”

Eyes, face, neck, shoulders; piece by piece Simra had gone into a bow. Cowering. And in front of a glorified curtain, a slackjawed upjumped steward who let his self go silent and his body be ridden for a bare scrap of station and an array of stupid hats. Pathetic, he thought. You’re at least as good as him, just selling a different part of yourself. Least you keep yourself your own. Not occupied, not owned, invaded. Simra made himself straighten.

“Commission work, then? Alright, alright.” His deference slipped; it was getting him nowhere. Little to lose if the words were his own now. House Dunmeris, low and colourful, lifted from the streets and canals of Narsis and studded with glittering anomalies stolen from books and sermons and lawtracts. “I’m not saying I won’t do it. Not saying you’re a fool either. Let the record show. Don’t get to be where you are, who you are, and stay a fool for long — right? You know your work, I know mine, and commission work comes with terms. Mutual guarantees, in writing, of good behaviour, good results. Right? Point the first. You tell me who, where, and what to expect. I don’t go in blind or lied to. Turns out you obfuscated, left out some sharp little detail, deal’s off at my discretion and any contract we had? Void. Point two, I name a price. Negotiable, but I name it. Three: half that fee up front, rest on completion. I scribe us a writ on receipt, go on my way, and ghosts be good you get a corpse a little while later. Suit you?”

A hacking wheeze came from the Mouth’s open throat. Laughter. A hard thing to translate from one body to another without losing something on the way. “You are already paid in full. A debt, ha?”

Simra blinked long and hard. His eyes came open scowling, frowning, confusion and fear. “Might be I’m mistaken. Might be you’ll tell me different, but . . . there’s no debt. Not to your House. Not to you, that’s for surety.” His lip curled, showing teeth. “What I owed, I paid.”

“Wrong! Quite wrong! Payment, terms of payment, quite generous terms of payment you were offered for what you bought. And –” the Mouth drawled where Ulessen’s voice cooed through him “– the small matter of a favour. One day, or perhaps never, a favour would be asked of you, ha? The rest you bought for coin. Those were your terms.”

Simra’s gut fell. Lungs stiff and cold. “Yeah . . .” The nails of his right hand cut crescents into the palm as it knuckled into a fist, cradled and hidden in his tight-crossed arms. “But what I bought? I didn’t buy it from you.” He’d tried for doubt and defiance, but the words came out as a plea.

“No. No no, but I bought the part unpaid. The writwork.”

At her order, the retainer stepped smart forwards and uncapped his scrollcase. He thrust out a hand at Simra, holding a narrow ribbon of paper, spidered with ink. Simra didn’t need to read it. He recognised the seal of yellow-white wax, even the ragged signature. His own was marked next to it.

The Mouth’s lips peeled open, teeth shut and bared like a black gate closing. The wrapped head lolled forward, like a weight was on it, pressing down, just more than it could bear. “I have the writwork. I have the seal and sworn word of that petty Sadrith Mora bonegardener you hired. Perhaps you would like to know, she sold it for a pittance. I say again, I own your favour, ha? Your hand is mine and will do as it’s bid. Am I wrong?”

Simra made blank his face. Muscles twitched hidden inside his scarred mouth and his backteeth met and wrestled. “I’m free after that?” he said. “All debt’s paid off?”

The Mouth’s head jerked up, then drooped into a clumsy nod.

“Then tell me who and where.” Simra bared his teeth, about to kiss them. He thought better of it. “And tell me who I talk to about that writ.”


	60. Chapter 60

The Tel’s insides were a foam, a honeycomb, of rooms and chambers, halls and keeping-closets, locked rooms and open hollows, and pantries where secrets were kept to mature. Impossible to tell how smooth or thick the walls ran, in smooth run-and-set stonework or the wood-ropey flesh of the great fungus, raw or clothed in plaster. Winding corridors curled round them, like veins in a body, all angling at the barest cant to give no sense of up or down.

With two retainers and their short swords at his back, Simra was marched through the maze of passages. He went ahead but they directed him in grunts and murmurs.

“Left . . . Left again . . . Don’t look up.”

They passed through a low dark belly of a room, where Simra’s eyes strained at their upmost edges to glance at what he wasn’t meant to see. Wriggling glittering somethings, spooling and knotting in masses, tangles, across the glow-spangled ceiling.

“Don’t you look back neither.”

One of them jabbed something into the small of Simra’s back, just below where his jacket ended. The pommel of a sword? No, thinner — the stem of a pipe as the retainer packed it with leaf. Ordered about all day, it was no wonder they relished a chance to prod and snap and make demands of someone else. Not so for Simra. Hating to lead as much as he hated following, this was the only thing worse: both at once, borrowing the worst from each.

“Rock arch, see?” With only a blind wall ahead, the passageway broke hard left into a doorway more like a cavemouth, an eyeless eyesocket of stone. “Through there.”

Another jab at Simra’s elbow. A snort of laughter behind him, inside the muffle of a helmet, and they goaded him through. Like showing a horse the touch of a whip at its flank; left or you get the full thrash of it. Simra tasted metal. His eyes flashed hate into the high chamber they entered. Empty, like all but all the whole rest of the tower. So much space and so little living done in any of it. Just rooms and objects, waiting to have a use found for them, or waiting to be unforgotten.

This was the tower’s spine now. Stone walls and a floor like coarse-grained glass, the shapes of moths and fishes frozen in it beneath Simra’s boots. Were they painted, or paralysed there? The light was wan and jaundiced gold, glinting on the seams and ripples of the architecture. Sigils and signs showed daubed in the wall, but only in shimmerings, when the light struck them right. Like they’d been scrawled in snailspit, or long-dried brine.

“Eyes forward,” one of the retainers growled.

They came into a tight helical staircase. The steps were steep and high, a lunge between each and the next. It felt hidden, shameful. Something for servants to suffer up and down, unseen by true Telvanni. The light from the chamber before only stretched so far. Soon the stairs rose into shadow.

“I could make a light . . .” Simra muttered.

“Sooner you didn’t.”

“Got hands? Eh? Ain’t you?”

“Use them.”

That curt humourless laughter again. Simra fought to unclench his hands from the fists they made. Reached out to the stair’s outer wall and spiralled dizzying upward, through the deepening dark. He heard their armour behind him. Slide and grind, the occasional insect click. The dusty shuffle of netch leather. In the gloom he came aware of their breath too, heavier than his, suffering worse from the climb. A small victory, but it was all he’d get here. He could turn and push them down. Use the dark to call a flash of sparks like burning whitesteel, while his eyes were closed and theirs were open, and take them down in the confusion. And then what? Who was to say his magic would even work here, in the clutches of other far stronger magics? Bravery or idiocy — he didn’t have enough of either to try.

The chambers they passed through could have housed everyone he’d seen at ground-level. Wide spaces, vaulted and theatrical, with hooks and loops of metal on the walls, abandoned by their obscure purposes. Deep narrow alleyways stretching into darkness, corrugated on either side with shelves and furred with dust. Instead they walked through it all like a ruin, empty of life and with only echoes for sound.

When Simra arrived where they’d been taking him, it felt like coming full-circle. Off a tight horseshoe of corridor, the door they stopped at looked familiar. Look closer and it was identical. Rounded top and faded green boards. Same as the door that had led into Ulessen’s audience chamber and closed, guarded, behind him. Same down to the bardings of brasswork that grew creeperlike across it. That’s if Simra remembered correct, and he was all but certain he did.

Inside was the same too. Identical to the brink of unreal. Same dimensions and same domed ceiling. Like they’d walked him round the tower just long enough to empty the room and fill it again. The last room had been sparse. This one swarmed with items, objects, interest. Simra stepped inside, into the narrow plot of floor left bare of bookheaps and scrolls weighed open with stones and empty pots of tea. Simra stared.

A gin of copper wires and glass shapes hung overhead. Ellipses formed slow-turning orbits, drooping beads and chips of flint and scraps of coloured fabric on an axis of warped smooth wood. A vague silver-white light glowed down from it, sourceless, like stolen starlight. A censer sighed out smoke from a little spindle-legged table. Brass, shaped like a twisted tree, its bare branches hugged round the form of a moon, with incense oozing from the craters and holes. The walls were the same plaster as before, but drilled and hived and pitted, full of scrolls, labelled in scrawl with ribbons of writing pinned above each.

Buried so deep in her habitat, the scribe was almost hidden until Simra spotted her. A Dunmer woman, shapeless or plump within the hillock of housecloaks and shawls she wore. The largest overcloak was a lustrous pricey brown, fuzzed and soft like the body of a moth. Beads whispered across its surface, aimless as clouds or stars, in all the near-black iridescence of beetleshells and bugwings. She knelt at a writing lectern. At least, Simra thought she was kneeling. Shelves and saucers on branches of greening copper thrust out from the lectern, like the legs on a belly-up scarab, or the spars on a candletree. They held inkstones, pens and brushes, optics and pouches of powder. Her skeleton-skinny arms thrust out from gashes in the cloak. They turned first to Simra, then her narrow head, shaved except for a high bun at the back of her crown, dyed a dark moss-green.

“And you are here for . . ?” Her eyes narrowed almost to nothing as she stared. Like she was squinting at him through her eyelids, paper-thin and chased with veins that ran pink through the marble-pale grey. “Let me see you. Closer, close now. Yes. Let me guess . . .”

Simra shuffled a half-step closer. Close enough to kick if he wanted to, and part of him did. He’d had a bellyful of being looked at of late. Turned over and surmised onto, and shaped like a little clay idol behind the eyes of others.

Her nostrils flared and her mouth valved small and colourless. “Not many years to you. Not yet. But a good deal hanging on those you have. Hm. Hmm. A drab little pupa, wrapped up in roughsilk and waiting to be what you are? Hmm. Now now, I do not see how it shall come to you if all you do is run, but—”

“A writ,” Simra cut in. “Mistress Ulessen sent me. We’re to make out a writ together. Settle on details, make copies. That’s all.”

“Of course she did, of course she did.” The scribe’s eyes snapped open again and her head sprung round to face her lectern. “My mistress-sister let me know you were coming, of course, but – hmm – always in a rush, always such a rush with her and her doings. One cannot haul the future in like a fish, you know. Do you know? Reel and reel all you like but it will not be tomorrow any sooner. Ffah. Do you know? No, she always did loathe to allow me my pastimes . . .” Her spindly hands followed her head as she spoke, and turned to her tools. “Name? I do not imagine you would let me guess . . .”

“Simra Hishkari.” Pastimes, she’d said. An amateur seer, seemed like. Not farsight but the future and the past. That was all he needed. Today had been enough already without someone getting involved in his tomorrows too. “Not sure why I had to come to you, if I’m honest. Sure you’re busy and I’d sooner not trouble you. I do my own scrivwork on the ordinary. Have for years.”

“Curious, curious. I see. Hm, I think I am starting to see . . . Yes, hulled up partly in paper . . .”

“But if Mistress Ulessen insists . . .” Simra interrupted again, keen to keep the old scribe’s reveries brief, or at least unspoken. “The writ?”

“Yes, yes, Felisa will not wait, will she? Hmm.” She reached out an arm, shocking in its length from the squat fat mass of her form. Working fast, she put out two wide sashes of paper in parallel on her lectern.

“So, terms. I’ve got terms. My price, as named by me. Half on agreement, half on completion. Everything, all pertinent details — I get them before I sign anything. Anything’s off, left out, withheld? I’ve got the right, in paper and ink I’ve got the right, to void the whole thing, carry on with my life, keep the half I was given on trust. Broken trust. Extreme? Right, but it gives you good reason not to get all obfuscatory with me. Or lie. Right?” Simra tailed off. “Dunno how much of that applies anymore. Here, I mean. Things being all . . . exceptional.” Bitter, Simra mithered the last word. Didn’t cover the barest part of how things had turned out. “Reckon I can make it apply though, give me half a chance.”

The scribe was working with brush and ink now. A line on one scroll, then its mirror on the other, she twinned the two lengths of paper in black and vehement cursive.

“Give me a chance, and I reckon I can make it apply some way or other.” Simra’s mouth was ready to talk on, half-open and tongue poised behind his half-parted teeth. He’d already said so much and barely just come aware of it. He forced a moment’s silence to think what he was thinking, feel what he felt.

A high fast something buzzed in his head. Ideas and images, emotions and concepts, spinning and changing so fast they made motion and momentum, animate and livid. Like the pictures cut into the side of a story-lantern becoming an archer pulling a bow, letting fly an arrow, or a guar going from standing to walking to running, in golden light and blackened ironwork. So fast it was hard to keep things separate.

Simra sniffed. Sucked a short breath through his teeth and tasted it while it crossed his tongue. Salt and sweet, edged with the pastel aftertaste of meat that had dried till it grew a dust of white powder. Under that, something deep and broad and yellow-smelling. Rich and excessive and not quite pleasant, like the waft of half-rancid fatback frying in another room.

It was the incense. Of course it was. It marestailed the air and fogged the floor below. He’d been breathing it all this while. Started to talk like the scribe, head so full it had to vent off the excess. Simra wasn’t clear on the ingredients, but he knew an alchemical sharp when he saw one, smelt one — felt one itching its way into his brain, agitating every mote of greymatter to life. And if he was any judge, this was an expensive one.

“What’s this?” he said, swimming a hand through a band of smoke. “Scholar’s salts? Guljana extract? Helps you work?”

“Trama charcoal.” The scribe didn’t look up from her lectern. Only carried on with her fevered brushwork. “Bloatspore oil. An infusion, hm.” She said it like a secret, a smile pinching the parts of her face Simra could see.

“Of course. Of course of course. Nothing so base or back-alley as what I’m used to. Scholar’s salts? Tscht. But this? This seems good. Very fine.”

Fine, Simra thought, long as you’re alone, or else not with anyone you need to watch your mouth around. Ought to start carrying slowers, he thought. Inhibitors, counter-toxins. Huffs or eyerubs, something to coat a clean blade and slip into a cut — quick workers for times of need. Ought to have Tammunei brew some up. Ought to buy some, way back down through the Tel.

“Don’t mind me asking but where’d you source it? Your own recipe, or . . ?”

“Gannis. Do you know Gannis, hm, down in the lower Tel? No no, why would you, hm? Old, he is. Old and been training bloat to grow tame all his life. Quite stupid save for that talent of his. The Red Year, I think it quite broke him in pieces, but do you see, he has a daughter and she, yes, she . . .” A point of dark purple tongue poked from the scribe’s mouth as she copied a sigil from one scroll to the other.

“She mixes it?”

“Yes yes, did you not just hear me think as much?”

Simra drank down as much of the incense as he could without seeming to. He imagined every inhale in terms of what it would’ve cost him. At a guess he could never have afforded to breathe in this room as long as he already had, if the incense had come from his own pocket. It was clean and stark as sharps go. A far-distant cry from the crude Guljana chews he was used to, or the huff-bottles and gumpowders you’d find in the hands and minds of students and scrivs, mages and gamblers across Morrowind and further. Moonlighters, lamplighters, workers by candlelight; those out past dayfall and awake through the night.

He treated it like a gift, then. Meant or not, it was hospitality. About time he was shown some of that round here. Guest-graciousness, even if only the skinniest glimmer, aglint like fine stitching on the hems of his thoughts.

If his tongue wasn’t running, his thoughts clamoured. If his thoughts were quiet, his eyes ran wild and hungry, taking in all that they could. Titles on bookspines, closing-cuffs on scrolls, snatches of prose and thickets of notes. He mulled greedy over it all.

‘On The Tapping Of Oneiric Emissary Energy; or The Obsoletion of Souls.’ ‘Stone, Types 63 to 128.’ His eyes flickered, pupils darting, and tongue tracing the points of his teeth. ‘Curses, their Vessels and Maintainment.’ ‘. . . and so you see the Root Cause and core and coremost enforwardment of this, my Treatise: that Entropic Accumulations and the gatherance of Potential Change in a body – that is, the private Person of a white or black souled entity; or yet the Form of a Concept; or yet the organisational Body of a Community or Entity Politic – are the Cause of both Deterioration that once was enthought to be Natural, and in parallel, to summate, also the Cause of All Debillitance and Pain in the Joints, conceptual or actual, FURTHERMORE this Combined Gatherance may be SIPHONED with the effect that . . .’

He caught sight again of the two scrolls on the lectern. His thoughts jarred and stopped.

“Those aren’t writs, are they?”

“For you?” The scribe looked up now, eyes dark full of their own pupils and powerful in their focus. “Oh no no. Hmm. No. You scribe your own writs. Did I not hear you say so? These . . .” The two scrolls were patterned with a mirroring network of hieroglyphs, diagrams, wordwork in the gaps. Even the dry ink still gleamed as if wet. “These are transport.”


	61. Chapter 61

Fragmented obscenities, senseless and out of joint, Simra heard himself cursing. “Ghosts of my forefuckers! Fuck. Piss it up to the teeth. Where? Where? Had to? Had you?”

He was in a whiteness. He was standing, bending, coming straight again with a jerk, all at the heart of a pattern dug from the white, neat as a diagram. He blinked. Watched the world go black then blinding white once more. Couldn’t see out beyond armslength, a little further. One arm, reach it out, see the stretching twitching fingertips, and maybe another arm past that, and he could see no further. Just pale air, buzzing and boiling with motion.

At the waist and then through his back, Simra buckled. Bent double as he dry heaved down into the white between his boots, vision blurring. Spasm after wracking spasm, driving him to his knees, until white spit strung from his lips and was lost in the snow.

“Snow . . .” he slurred, blinking hot wetness from the corners of his eyes.

Wherever they’d sent him, it was snowing. Cold, dry snow that settled on his mantle and hair, meshed into his lashes when he closed his eyes, and refused to melt. The air was crisp and sharp. The rest was unclear. Like he’d forgotten.

Head bowed and staring down, at the scraps of stony hoary dirt visible through the frost, he waited for things to make sense. His shoulders shuddered, his legs twitched. One by one his limbs remembered themselves, prickling and burning like they’d gone to sleep and woken up furious and full of confusion. The nausea was worst of all, but it was first to fade. Memory came into the lack it left, in pieces and shreds and tangles.

Tel Branora. He’d asked if it would hurt, being sent out. Lying nix-fuck told him no. Just a moment’s discomfort if he was unused to translocation. Unused? Try first time, he’d said. But this went beyond discomfort. This was like being wrung out, shattered to pieces, then puzzled back together, bit by stinging bit, somewhere new. Somewhere cold, to boot. There’d been a taste of copper in his mouth. A smell like after lightning on a hot evening. Then this. Then now, and here, wherever here was. North, they’d said. Did he remember north? An island. Somewhere with a different kind of Winter.

Simra forced himself upright. A hole in the calf-deep snow healed up slow around him. Like a wind-devil had raged here, just for a moment, then died out quick as blinking. Spiral arms and broken orbits scythed out from the hole like faultlines. Symmetries and inversions; fading geometries. This was the impact left from his arrival. An after-etching of the ritual drawn out on the floor.

He hugged his arms around himself, tight beneath his mantle, and stepped from the blast. This was brittle cold, thin-aired cold. Chalkdusty snow like midwinter in Eastmarch, when the winds and weather blew in together from off the Sea of Ghosts. North, they’d said. An island. Master Vidaru’s holdings, like that ought to mean something. But the Sea of Ghosts was far enough that they’d want to translocate him. That made sense. About time something did.

Through the hazy air and blank-white sky, the daylight was pale and feeble. Snow packing tight beneath his boots as he pushed through it, high strides and stinging cheeks and jaw already aching, Simra reckoned it’d be evening soon. He’d need to find shelter.

“Be clever as all fuck-off,” he muttered, breath smoking as it hissed from the thin part in his lips. “Know words that fold the world and break a crack through both sides to pitch some p-p-poor fucker through . . . But have a scrap of common s-s-sense in your cousin-f-f-fucker’s eggshell of a s-s-skull? Nah, that’s asking t-t-too fucking much. Fucking . . . Telvanni . . .”

He didn’t waste breath after that. Just thought it over, and tried to keep his heat to himself.

If anger was embers, Simra Hishkari . . . Caselif had said that, once and more than once. If anger was embers you’d be a mer for all weathers. I’d make you fume just to toast a pan of nuts on your head. Wrong, Simra thought now. He’d always tried with Case to keep the worst of it from him. Tried not to be the first thing he felt, but act instead on the second thing he thought: calmer, and even kind. And when Case teased him, he’d grin and take it.

But trying to be better doesn’t change who you’ve been. And what Case said was still wrong. If anger was embers, Simra Hishkari . . . He remembered a game from the Grey Quarter. Urchins had played it in Winter, when there wasn’t much to do but loiter round fires of third-rate peat and try not to choke on the smoke. Soraya maintained she’d invented it, though he’d never known her to play. Like as not she’d learnt it from older kids, who’d learnt it from older kids, who’d learnt it from drunks in cornerclubs back since Azura’s curse came down. It’d had plenty of names – Catchfire, Musgan, Hand Of Glory – and they faded in and out of fashion. Most of all though, Simra’d heard it called Hold-A-Coal. Flip a penny for who goes first and then players would have a lump of something burning dropped into their hand. Clutched it as long as they could while the watchers chanted a count. One! Two! Three! Their opponent tried to do the same for longer, make the rest count higher. Winner got to make demands, one for every count their total exceeded the loser’s. Holding embers; a uniquely Dunmer kind of stupid. But try swallowing one. If anger was embers, Simra Hishkari, it would’ve burnt a hole through you long ago.

Simra put Caselif out of mind. He’d got good at that; at least as good as thoughts of Case were at wriggling their way back in. He counted his breaths, his steps, every pace sigh-crushing through the fine dry snow. Had to mark progress somehow, otherwise he was going nowhere.

He thought of the Telvanni again. Thought of what he knew. Might be that he’d been right. Might be an oversight sent him here with night charging in and the cold coming with it. Not unlike Telvanni to leave something as simple as weather unconsidered in an otherwise tight-woven plan. Why make allowances for something you can frown at, mumble a few words, and change? But just as probable was that no one had cared enough to do different. Not their problem, this cold, this wind. They weren’t the ones losing feeling in their feet. Just like the task, the target, were Simra’s problem now, not theirs.

Dalvur Vedith. A Telvanni, they’d said, but a renegade. Once part of the household of Tel Branora, but since a runaway, and still causing problems. A turncoat then, Simra had asked, under Vidanu’s protection? But Ulessen had laughed, said no. Vidanu was many things – a young nobody most of all – but even he knew better than to risk angering his betters taking on such a waste of skin as Vedith. It had gone in the writ. All he knew; all they’d told him. Simra made sure of that.

Sighing hard through his nose, Simra untucked a hand from under his arm. Out from the hot and into the biting wind, his skin began straight away to sting and itch. Should’ve got a coat; really should. How many times had he thought that since Bodram and done nothing? He cursed every single time in sharp-breathing silence. At least without gloves he still had other options.

Simra made a fist in front of his chest and knocked it once against his sternum. Opened the fingers with a quick snap. Violence in the gesture, but rhythm too, and a fast even exhale. A flame danced above his palm, round-bellied and flickering upward, like a teardrop of light and heat. White-blue at heart and blossoming into reds and stammering pinks, sparks and coughs of steam where it met a flake of snow.

It warmed his chest and washed through him. Lit his fingers in all the colours of flame as snow-steam cooled to water in his grip and ran off, tepid down the channels of his palm. Gather and drip from the points of his knuckles.

The world around turned from hazy white to white-chased blue, to a moment’s pink. Then a blackness fell, raging full of snowflakes.

Squeezing light now as well as heat from the palm-sized drop of flame, Simra quickened his pace. The spell was simple to call, but harder to keep up. He tried not to think of time passing, his strength fading. He failed. Would he get hungry first, or absent-minded? Feel his focus slip and see the flame go out? At least if he fell here and didn’t get up then Ulessen would have to find herself some other catspaw.

“Fuck . . .” he growled, breath smoking. His thoughts had got indifferent, distant. That was bad. This was bad.

And then the snow stopped, so sudden he never realised it till time had gone by and it’d been stopped all the while. The night-black that stretched up and ahead and beside Simra went on forever. All around, except to one side in the nearish distance where the ground pitched up. Why climb a slope? Waste your strength, waste your breath, die quicker out here? Why not? So he climbed.

The texture of his footfalls changed. Something solid now, and less that grit and moved beneath his boots. He buckled forward almost onto his hands as he started less to walk, more to scramble. The slope steeped further. His left arm craned awkward out and up, holding the flame ahead like a torch. The circle of light that surrounded him became a straggling ellipse, flickering before him.

A foot stumped, made him stumble. Simra choked out a curse. Thrust out a hand to catch himself and shoved it hard down. His knee bloomed bright in pain. The flame in his palm blinked out and he was in darkness. He raked in a breath, sob-sounding, trying not to panic, finding the hopeless cold made it almost easy. Feel around, feel his way upright. But what he’d stumbled on was a step. The first syllable of a long dark stairway. He’d skinned his palm on another as he fell.

Shuddering already, Simra fought up a little further in the blackness. A little further, then backwards, to sit down on a step and breathe hard and hot and sighing-damp onto his freezing stinging hands.

“Ghosts and bones . . . Blood of my fucking blood . . .”

Head bowed and hair in his face, he chattered through rattling teeth, almost like the start of a prayer, over and over. Might’ve been, too, for most other Dunmer. Ancestors guide me; foremothers teach me; forefathers protect me. To those that came before me, I speak and say I am in need. If this was the Sea of Ghosts, the Telvanni Archipelago, he was closer now to where they lay, but worlds of silence distant. An impassive ocean, heedless, between him and the ghosts whose names he was never told, and who were never told his.

He felt with a bloody hand into his satchel, blind, and brought out a clay compact. A little crucible, sealed with a tight lid. Bringing it to his mouth and nose, hunching towards it, he fumbled to break the seal. Breathed deep. A moment of blue-grey fumes glittered in the dark. The concentrate inside reacted with the air and sang down into his lungs. He hadn’t known how tired the spell had made him until he felt this new surge of magicka, fighting back the exhaustion.

He snapped another calling. The little flame danced back to life, sputtering and flickering. The warmth came back with it, brighter, safer.

Simra looked down, looked around, as he turned and crabbed back to his feet. The stairs were dark and pitted by time beneath his boots, past the wind-fussed red ribbons that tied their padded knees in place and showed bright in all this black and white. Stairs, he told himself, staring down, peering ahead. Stairs meant a path to something. Shelter or summit, he couldn’t be sure, but it was better than wandering lost.

A moment stretched and passed before he realised there was no snow here. None had settled on the stone this place was built from. Coarse and porous, it had shredded a ragged crescent of red from his palm. He flexed the fingers, clammed the hand open and closed. Blood welled slow from the welt and dried clammy then stiff.

Simra returned the bloodied compact to his bag and continued to climb. Dry mouth, tinged with belladonna, creeproot, a solvent acridity, numbing and clean.

On one side a pillar snaked from the incline, ending in nothing but night sky. Blunt pedestals of stone flanked the stairway as it twisted a path up the hillside, mountainside, the face of this pyramid, or whatever else it might be. They stood arbitrary at intervals, less like milestones and more like the last teeth left in a jaw.

A ruin, Simra reckoned before he saw the truth of it. And then the stairs ended, and thrust him amongst it. Coils of inscrutable masonry, fit together in ways that shouldn’t have worked, interlocking in arches and strabismic buttresses, supporting nothing but their own overreach.

Like the walker in a maze can make out only the next turn, the way behind, and not the maze itself, Simra moved in his capsule of light and warmth. There were no rooms so far, no buildings, just the structure, built for no reason but to be. A temple maybe, or a monument. Something ruined for so long its purpose is lost but the attempt to fulfil it remains.

Simra was afraid of it. Not the stone or the structures, and maybe not even the shadows and the keening wind. Just a threat in the air; an unease. He bent and drew the wand from his boot. Better that than try wield a sword in his raw and half-scabbed hand.

He skirted the ruin’s limits but had a sense of turning inward. Clambering over a fallen strut, thick as the stoutest Falkreath oaktrunk, Simra saw something ahead. A place where the wings and torques of architecture hedged together and tangled. It was almost like a dome, almost like walls, and almost like the twist and knot that the wand he carried made in the matter it struck. At least he’d be out of the wind, out from under the sky. He had a destination. Somewhere to stop.

He pierced into the dark, staring into the tangled dome-shape. Shattered urns and dessicated scraps of colour that might have once been flowers. The bones of small creatures, fish, birds. Nothing that moved or moved on him.

Simra stepped inside. A ceremonial scent still clung to the air here, smelling of new sweat, old metal, bad perfume, unguents and burnt oil. Finding a wall, Simra turned his back against it and collapsed.

Temple, he decided. Smelled like a temple, anycase. Prayer and undisturbed dust, and the dry decay of offerings left to air. For all that littered the room there was almost nothing to burn, but the cold had let up since he entered. He was past questioning why. Some lingering magic, some quality of the stone, same perhaps as whatever stopped the snow from settling . . .

“I’ll take it,” he murmured.

Like letting go some small animal he’d clutched to him all this time, Simra angled his hand towards the floor, between his bent and spread knees. The flame slipped down to the dusty ground and sat a while, still burning.

He was tired to breaking but sleep kept its distance. Safe, or feeling safer; warm, or feeling warmer, he fell back into himself, and screwed his eyes tight. He could have died. So easy, he could have died out there, and they’d have sent him to it, on ignorance or uncaring. His fury turned to terror turned to fury turned relief. Then almost panic again, as he remembered the scroll in his bag.

He hissed through his teeth, scrabbling his book-bag open and searching out the scroll. A sending-spell; one of the tools the scribe had given him, hashed out hasty when he’d balked at Ulessen’s impatience. Send him out now? Right now? What about them back at his camp? he’d said. Telling them where he was and not to worry? What about his friends? He’d said he wanted them with him, but when the Telvanni told him there was no time, that he’d have to go alone, the sense of release was almost crushing. Alone again, at least for a while. Guilty, but he’d grab it wholehearted. In the end the scroll had been a compromise. One chance to send his speech and say what needed to be said.

He had to tell them, he thought as his heart raced. Ought to, he thought as it slowed. But he was tired. Ghosts and bones and blight and all, he was tired. Sitting up, cool but made warm by the contrast, he angled back his head into the wall behind him, and slept heedless and deep as his little flame blinked out.


	62. Chapter 62

Through its shoddy roof, the ruin let in the whole morning all at once. White and harsh and clean, light broke in through the seams and stripes where the dome fit together. In its glare, in breaths of steam and clouds of dust, Simra griped up and onto his feet.

Every joint was stiff. He looked ceilingwards, squinting. Invasions of sunlight through the holes, irregular as rags in shape. He craned back till something caught painful then clicked, somewhere just under the blades of his shoulders. Turned through the waist with his feet planted, one way and the other, and the sides of his body unknotted a little. He rolled his neck and worked his jaw as he moved.

The night-cold had gotten into him as he slept. Nothing sharp and gnawing now, but the lingering numbness of a long-suffered chill. And maybe that was worse in the long of things.

He cupped his hands and spoke a flame again into his palm. Rest had restored him some, but if he'd slept deep it was only for exhaustion. Discomfort, cold, and hunger now too — they should have limited him, made his magicka grow back slow. Instead he felt full of it. Tired, painful, raw-tempered, but with plenty inside him to burn. Was it this place, he wondered, or some linger leftover from the fumes he'd inhaled? A hangover come helpful for once.

He walked a circuit round the chamber. Thought, as the flame cupped to his chest drove the cold out once again. He could clean himself with a cantrip. Might drive off some of the weariness the night had hung on him. But there was no knowing how much Winter and how much nothing surrounded him here. No knowing how long he'd need to keep a flame burning from nothing but magicka. It was easy enough to stay warm, he reckoned, if only just warm enough. But it would be hard to save strength for much else.

Loping back to where he'd slept, Simra checked his bags. Five twists of guljana for chewing and some fumes left in the compact. He could turn to those if he felt his magic flagging. Hunger was a harder problem to solve. He searched again, this time for rations. He thought and thought better of eating a spoonful of preshta-jan. The salty red spice-paste and a few dried black mushrooms were the closest things he had to food. Best not wake his belly, he reckoned. Not for so little. He knew how hunger worked, in lulls and pangs and sickening cave-ins. Best to let his appetite forget itself as long as it would.

Bags strapped on now, Simra left the dome. A fine snow fell, and melted to nothing as it touched the ground, the walls, the arches and upsweeps of the ruin. Whispering on the air, a restless breeze was all that remained of last night’s blizzard. A weak blue sky overhead, and chased with faults of fine white cloud.

“Get lucky and you might be able to see worth two shits,” Simra muttered. “How bout that.”

He peered along the way between the ruin’s columns and wings. Vantage. That was what he needed. Perspective. He searched the architecture for something to scale. He’d climbed to get up here. See for leagues if only he could climb a little more.

“How about that . . .”

It was a long slow arch at first. A flying buttress that inclined into a brief length of wall, high and almost sheer, rising above the ruin like a tidal wave, a cliff-face. A sky-reaching wedge, opaque of purpose, it broke blunt and flat at its upmost point like something had snapped it away.

“Yeah. You’ll do.”

Simra shucked off his bags again at the root of the buttress. Thought again, and unbrooched his goatskin mantle, his sister’s jacket. Laid the mantle down like a groundsheet, the jacket safe from the ground on top of it, and then weighted them both with his gathersack on top. For all the day was cold, he knew he’d be hot and getting hotter soon as he started to climb. And if he fell? Skin heals by itself, but good leather takes fixing.

He stared at his palms, one scabbed over and chased with silver scars, the other holding the little pot-bellied flame. He let the fire go out and began to climb. A running start, a scuffing run up the stonework, and Simra clawed his way over the initial rise of the buttress. It was steepest there, and easier after.

He’d climbed its like in Windhelm. One ran a gutter from the roofs of the upper city and down into Crucible. One of the easier ways to go uptown without braving Northslope and its guards, if you didn’t mind heights, and Simra had long ago learnt to pretend not to mind — pretend hard enough to fool even himself sometimes.

But this buttress coiled as it charged wallwards, twisting over and over itself like an auger. It made for more handholds, more purchase or his boots as he scuttled up it, but to find them he had to look. Eyes on the stone, places to grip and places to tread, and eyes straying past to the ground. Easy to not mind heights when you fool yourself about them. But looking down as he scaled higher, Simra felt his breath go short, his stomach fall. He carried on, but didn’t feel wise in doing it.

The wall soared up in front now. That was the first stage, done with, dealt with. He fidgetted, clung, shuffled, till his legs hung astride the buttress. Leaning down, hugging it to his chest with his arms tight around it, he rested a moment, eyes fixed on a spur of ruin a short ways ahead, to keep his balance.

The sun was on his back. Warm, like he knew he’d be. It was almost pleasant, save for the prickle of sweat beneath his two shirts. Enough basking. You’ve started, so finish. Simra grumbled in the back of his mouth and looked then leaned up.

The rest of the climb was twice his height, he reckoned, if not a little more. Not far now. He judged with his eyes, then let his body do the reasoning. A kind of controlled sidelong leap and he scrabbled with one foot, groped with his right hand. His fingers caught. He strained and tightened through his middle and wrenched a foot, a padded knee, onto the sloping back of the wedge.

Safe or something like it, Simra clung to the stone. Snatching back his breath and balance, he paused a moment. His heart hammered in his chest. Not just fear anymore but a childish excitement, woken and welling up from the past. It felt good. Good to be good at something. Good to feel younger than he was, not older. Ghosts only knew he felt that seldom enough.

Just the incline remained, up the spine of this last rise. Squirreling hand over hand, with bent knees and hunched back, Simra came onto the narrow plateau where the wedge had its summit. Long and patient breaths now. He had time for them. He filled his chest and belly, and felt his scare-tight muscles come slack. He crouched there, steadied through his hands, and looked out across the view he’d won.

Ahead, behind, and leftward, the distance was brief. A short swathe of blinding white, then a black and sun-glittering ocean. The ruin rose up from a slow-climbing dark pyramid of hill, stony and snowless, crowning it in all its monstrous pointless monument, and overlooking the narrow spit of land its height commanded.

But to the right – west and southish, if Simra judged by the sun – the island bulked and broadened. Snow and snow, and a pattern of disruption that might’ve been a stretch of snowbanked trees. A curve in the island’s coast, sea biting a dark bay out of the land. But beyond that, he saw smoke. The source was blurred and uncertain at ground level, and hidden with settled snow. But the smoke itself was a surety. The wide white haze that rose from more than one hearth. A hamlet, a village, an outpost. Something. Somewhere to start.

Climbing down had none of the joy of going up, but still all the threat of falling. Simpler, but harder too, and half-blind as you crane to look down. And looking down is an issue all its own. See the fall, as your gut sees the fall, and sinks and twists in knots. Easier though, Simra told himself. Easier as you go.


	63. Chapter 63

Again that feeling of always Winter. None of the boons that Winter brings either. Being gladder than ever for what you have, so that hot food and dry feet and a roof to hem the hearth-heat in all feel like luxury itself. Just white damp, and the sapping chill. Parts of his body muttering their constant miseries, and parts that fall silent and numb. Always Winter, Simra reckoned, and always out in it. Never even half-warm or near to a hearth.

As he trudged through the snow Simra ransacked his mind, trying to remember what he could of Summer.

Roofs of slate and roofs of tar, shared with a multitude of smug-shaped birds. Roofs too hot to sit or stand on above the Grey Quarter. The roofs of Crucible, so hazing-hot he had to be always running, always dancing foot to foot, or start to burn through his wraps. Clean water, cool shade, each as precious as silver.

The grasses of the Rift, coloured always like Autumn, and wind-combed, dancing all round him, till the distance made a sameness of it all. Scent of it all round. Scent of a lakeside baking from mud to red dust. The hot walls of drystone houses, wrapped around the shade inside them.

The Dyer’s End shade and sunset over Old Ebonheart. Sitting and Caselif knelt behind him. Leaning forwards so Caselif’s hip wouldn’t press his back, and stick the day’s sweat to his shirt and shoulderblades. Caselif pinched his ear. Pinched the lobe numb before bringing out the needle.

A dusty Summer arriving early out from the cracked shell of Spring. Another lake, a different year. Sounds of toil and cheer over the drone of insects, hidden and countless — their season, more than anyone else’s. The scent of freshbaked bricks, broken earth. Ill-made sujamma, so local it tasted and smelt of nothing for how long he’d lived inhaling its tastes and smells in the world hereabouts. Just the burn in Simra’s throat as it slipped down. A dusty impatient Summertime, and a stranger arriving at an outpost with no name.

There’d been Summers then, but not so many as he had years. How? Simra kissed his teeth and fought a path around one deep drift of snow, keeping to where it was shallow. He wished he still had a spear. Something to lean on, reach out, pull himself forward, like a gondolier with his punt-pole. Things being as they were, he hunched in and over nothing, looking one-eyed out at the world and swapping eyes at intervals so as not to go snowblind.

The smoke was closer now. Hairline wisps, faint dark in a blue bright sky. Hard to say just how close. Just closer, Simra told himself for hope’s skinny sake.

With aching legs and growling belly, Simra crested a rise. His breath hissed dry and sour between his gritted teeth. For a long moment he shuffled on the spot, getting back his wind and shifting his weight from one haggard foot to the other. Both boots were wet and heavy, stained in tidemarks with melted snow. Then he raised his hands to his brow, shading his eyes, and looked.

The sea. One wide dark reach of water all along his right and biting into the land before him. Along the bay a low huddle of dark shapes capped with white. Huts, threading smoke into the air, sending jetties and moorlines out into the blackish-blue swash like the feelers of an insect, or the spooling tongues of a sea urchin.

Simra squinted at the outpost in the distance. Both eyes judged it now, and tried to better make it out. Some other kind of structure grew up on the edge of the outpost, a little ways inland. Like an arbour of stunted trees trained to grow together. Fibres, coiling and curling upward and around each other, like a huge work of birch-pale wicker, half-made into an irregular dome.

Simra’s head hung. His shoulders slouched their relief and his chin fell towards his chest. So much at least for starving. So much for dying, lost. His teeth were chattering. His jaw had been clenched, all this time, so hard it ached now to relax it.

One more long moment’s rest and then he struck out, digging in his heels as he went down the rise. An hour more of walking, he reckoned, and of cold. An hour into the afternoon and he’d be there, among roofs and walls, and the promises smoke makes in rising.

 

In the cold the sea was strange and quiet. To sight and to hearing it was thick and deep and still, like something almost solid. A resin maybe, or if it moved, it was in tides as slow and silent as running honey. On its face a thin froth of drifting ice, pieced apart and patched together, pieced apart and unshattered day after night after day.

But the jetties that overed out into it creaked and strained, loud enough to hear. Limbs of bandy plaintive wood. Sheets of tight-meshed wicker, buoyed up with airblown sacks of netch-leather, sharkskin, rayskin, the bladders of beasts. Of the trees that grew on this island, none were stout enough to make planks of.

Coracles of leather and bent wood, bent bone, shuddered between patchworks of ice. A few mer fished from them with barbed spears and hooked lines, pulling up pot-traps. Some leaned kissing-close to the face of the sea, whispering to it or so Simra reckoned. With spells and speech, charming fish and shelled things and fronds of seagreens up and towards the surface.

Simra thought of fish and his stomach twisted. He thought of fish roasted over flames of wood or charcoal, with their flaky white flesh all steeped in the smoke. His mouth was dry and wet both at once. And with it, and with his hunger writhing like a trapped eel inside him, he passed towards the waterfront, looking in over the outpost.

The roofs were of slate or some other dark screestone, Simra reckoned, but they were all covered thick with snow. Low shapes to keep the risen warmth close to those who lived in them, breathing and burning and cooking. Sometimes a fired earthen chimney throated up from the flank of one, snowless for the heat of the hearth at its root.

Some twenty buildings, Simra guessed, not counting the smaller ricks and cribs, smokehouses and hutches that scattered the snowy yards between them. There were no streets. The dwellings were spaced too far apart. Just the yawn between them. Just some stretches of mud where walking had stamped the snow to grey slush. Simra wondered whether, in warmer months, some of those spaces were fields or grazegrounds, scratchground for whatever could be husbandried up here. Or was the earth just stone the whole island over? Beneath his feet it felt hard enough for that. Frozen to the softness of lead.

Then his boots clicked and crushed against the shale of a beach. Simra drew even with the outpost, and looked inland from seaward.

He couldn’t make out anything like a commonplace house or cornerclub. All but all, the buildings were the same. Small and mean and keeping their heat and insides close. Greedy, grudging nothing to escape out their eyeless sides and faces; their low hooded lintels and walls of hackstone, mossgrown mortar.

Above the outpost and past it, the arbour of coiling shapes. Closer to, and with the squat little hovels and huts for company, it towered up over them. In stray clumps of upgrowth it climbed like vines climbing nothing. But the main structure, the dome, dominated the outpost’s edge, bellying towards the empty sky.

Between curiosity and hunger, Simra’s belly won out. He turned from the outpost and on down the beach to where the jetties began. Figures there in stillness and motion, some working, some sitting, some putting out to the ocean. Loud the shale beneath his steps, clashing and grinding like teeth against teeth. He tried to think what he’d say to them. How do you even start to explain how he’d come as he’d come to this place? That could come later. Start with what’s simple, he reckoned.

“Catch alright today?” he said to anyone listening. “Catch any good? Anyone with a surplus to sell?”

They were fishermen who looked out to sea or through him. Went back to weatherwaxing their little leather boats rather than meet his ask or eye. They were dressed in oiled hides and heavy cloaks; stitched into Ghostsea sealskins and with grease on their weatherhard faces to keep off the pinching cold. If not for the merish faces and greased eartips that poked from their swaddlings, Simra could have mistaken them for the Wintring traders that would come down to Windhelm when the rivers froze and the frosts moved south, making passage for their sleds. Nords would have balked at a stranger carrying a fire in his palm. These mer only balked at a stranger.

“Been a long journey brought me here,” Simra continued. “Hungry from it. I’ll pay to not be.”

Some were wrapped up heavier than most. In folds and bulges of coldweather clothing their arms looked stubby and strange, and their seated bodies huddled swollen like grubs. With bare and blue-turned hands they fussed over nets and pot-traps. Mending and untangling, patching and weaving; the kind of work that could never be done in gloves.

“Ser?” Simra crouched down before one of the net-menders, down to her level. An old woman, dark-faced and with heavy lines round her deep-set eyes. “Your blood’re all eating tonight, I hope?” He grit his teeth into a smile to keep them from chattering. “I’ve got coin if you’ve got a little in your pot for a stranger.”

Her face was empty. She looked up from her work but not for long. A sigh of steam from her small cracked mouth and she lowered her gaze again. Turned her uncaring full towards Simra and whatever else he said, she pretended not to hear.

The scene repeated. Same words, same silence, same old impassive faces on different people. Like in stories, the same thing, over and over. Only it was too late already for third time to be the charm.

He wondered if it was a matter of language. He’d not lived enough among Telvanni to have any deep sense of their tongue, or how it differed from the wider-catching Dunmeris he was speaking. The shallow impression he had was of a gulf between high and low. The archaisms and unmannered gibberish of the wizards, bookish and ancient, better used to tracts, treatises, and debate than conversation. And then the lesserlings who worked for them, lived under them. And there was nothing in that which would help him be understood.

When coin was no good, Simra offered things from his bags. Tea, sugar, parchment even — couldn’t be that they got much of trade goods out here. At least showing worked better than telling. The pouches, the sheafs, the black glittering cake of sugar, and the jangle and sway of bracelets on his wrists.

Three fishermen gestured Simra over to them. They sat round a smoky and reeking fire, burning something that was neither wood nor peat. On the low lazy flames, a soot-black cauldron full of dirty coloured oil. They fried him a small cake of dried fish and pale dried mushrooms. He ate it so hot his mouth hurt, and it all but choked in his throat as he fought to swallow. Their laughter was reedy and brief, but came round again when he tried to pay them.

Seemed not so much that they wanted what he had. Only that they wanted him to stop his begging. Their speech was garbled when they spoke, but not unfamiliar. A gruff and round-edged Dunmeris, unvarnished except sometimes by an oldness — some antique lurch of phrasing. But that was when they spoke, and they spoke little. Like breath was all that warmed them here and speech spent more of it than they’d like.

“Can you tell me where this is at least? What this island’s called?”

“Whyn’t you know?” said one of the fishermen, eyes either suspicious or amused. One of his company slaked the dried fish and formed the cakes. Another tended the pot. This one seemed to do no work at all, but spoke for the others.

“Hard to explain. Would you believe me if I told you a wizard sent me here?”

“Why’d I not? Makes for surety though. It’s nowt to do with us, nary a bit of it.” The other fishermen hummed and grumbled their agreement. “Most like it’s between you, your wizard, and ours.”

“And where would I find him, then? Your wizard?”

“His tower, course. Such as it is.”

They shooed him like a stray and scrap-fed cat after that, just as they’d beckoned him to them. On their direction Simra walked inland, between the low dark huts and houses, towards the tangle of growth on the outpost’s edge, and in search of Master Vidanu of the House Telvanni.


	64. Chapter 64

The hamlet ended, sudden and meagre as it began. No dwindle or slow fade as the huts and ricks, the smokehouses and storepits uncrowded away and away from each other. Just a point where Simra stepped past the last lowslung lodge, into then out from its lengthening afternoon shadow, and saw there was nothing else ahead. Not for a long stone’s throw. A thin white hinterland of untrodden snow, hard-froze with how long it had gone undisturbed. And then the rabble of shapes that made up Vidanu’s tower.

Simra looked back. Turned, stamping his feet in the snow to keep blood in them.

The staggered out plots of the hamlet. Sea, off in the distance, glitter and black, and seeming almost higher than the land with its farness. Sea and steppe have that in common — a flatness so huge it towers over you, like a wave gathering up and ready to break.

Closer by, a few wing-clipped racers pecked and scratched round the last homestead. Scrawny and small, their stiff plumes and coarse downy bodies were fluffed all to volume for warmth. Almost sad, Simra thought, seeing them crawling in the snow and dirt. Robbed of flight; kept for eggs and feathers, meat and leather. Almost, until one fixed him with a sharp little sidelong eye.

A shriek went up. Just the one at first but the whole flock took it up quick as blinking. Hateful little eyes and the open squawling wrongness of their mouths – toothed beaks, beaked muzzles – they scrambled squawking towards him. A thrashing of pierced pointless wings, as if to take flight.

Sympathy all swallowed up, Simra fought the urge to run. Went fast as he could without breaking a jog or showing them his back. The clumsy bent-kneed lope of a walk that wants to be something else, craning to look sideways over his shoulder as he went.

Crash of a door as it opened and Simra heard shouting. Bellowy lungfuls of calling, but after him or the racer-flock, he was too busy getting away to try pry apart which. If there’s a chance someone’s raising a hue and cry after you – trespasser, forager, looter, whatever you might be, running from their racers or racing off with one – better to run and never know than stay and get answers.

Churning the set snow with his boots now, Simra struck out into the hinterland, off and towards the Tel. One last glance over his shoulder. The racers hadn’t followed him far. They held back at the end of their scratching ground. Squalling and hissing, and hopping with shrill rage, but they’d stopped at the hamlet’s edge. Like guard-hounds tugging at the end of their leash, jawing and noising for all they can’t chase any further. The comparison set Simra’s nerves jangling, but better a dog barking on its leash than running and biting let loose from it.

Maybe that was what changed his pace. He’d broken into a run some few strides back and made himself ease back down. A warm steady lope, strides long and knees high to fight on through the snow. A wake of grey-tan slush behind him. The Tel standing out like a rash on the whiteness of the way ahead.

From afar it had looked scarce more than a tangle of shapes. Things the imagination would make into skinny trees maybe, climbing creepers, a pale deflated pavilion tent. But the distance had been kind to it. Closer to, it looked nothing so much as a mistake. Fungus, seeded and left to grow feral.

The ground was walked and worked to mud between drifts of shovelled snow. Blotches of yellow-white and powder-blue spattered the dirt like rotten velvet, like paint, like knurls of reset wax. Sporegrowth, Simra reckoned, like on a dead tree’s trunk, or a heel of bread left in the damp. He trod wary around them. Sooner step in the mud.

A loose thicket of stems half-circled the site. Spongy, fragile, moth-coloured, they wavered headless in the breeze. Leaning and sick-looking, they bent under their own weight. Simra reached out to touch one, curious how it’d feel, but thought better of it. Air was too cold anyway to bring his hand out from under his arms or let go the little morsel of flame he still carried.

Most of the stems rose skyward, though by twisted and stunted paths. Some yearnt across the ground, to die off in a heap of snow, or snake towards the dome. It was the cap of an emperor parasol; a young runt trying to spread and fruit. A dozen paces across and twice Simra’s height, it wallowed close to the ground, lumpen and swollen and stuck. Damp and rot had set in like a pox where its edges hung low to the earth.

Simra had never seen a Tel still in its first fits of growth. Wouldn’t so much as try to lie about being any kind of expert. But even unversed, he felt sure this place was a poor example. He walked through it, feeling all the same old Telvanni wrongness but none of the wonder that came with it.

A little dug-out lurked a few strides from the parasol cap. Crude, mean, miserable, even compared with the huts in the hamlet. Like someone had put knee-high walls and a tentlike roof over a mass grave and called the job done. But compared with the unkempt garden of Telvanni trial and failure here, it looked fit to home in. Then again, almost anything does when you’re out and stuck between snow and sky.

“A man trapped in Winter’s teeth will envy the fox her hole, the badger his set, and give not a thought to the stink,” Simra muttered. Nord wisdom, such as it was. Hadn’t heard that in a while. Then he called, loud as he dared. “Anyone about?”

Nothing but the wind at first. But it felt like back on the waterfront, amongst the fishermen and net-menders: the studied and deliberate silence of someone trying not to listen.

“Here to see Master Vidanu, if he’s home!”

A flap of the stretched hide roof shuddered then pulled up a smallway from the dug-out’s wall. A crack of space showed inside. A face in that new slot of shadow. Wide red eyes and little grey fingers grasping over the wall’s edge, drumming and fidgeting. “Who’s asking?” said a high voice from inside.

Simra paused without hesitating. Instinct by now to think before he answered, names and selves and deeds fanning out in his mind like cards. Vestigial though; an instinct from an older time. About this at least he was trying to be honest, when there was no skin to risk by doing so. “Simra Hishkari. Sellsword, scribe, scholar sometimes . . .” He tailed off, thoughts muddied by the cold, the slow gnawing sap of maintaining the flame in his left hand.

“What’s your doing here, Simra Hish-Who-Gives-A-Care?”

“This island’s Vidanu’s holdings, right? Reckoned I oughtta pay my respects.”

“First time for everything, then.”

“Got some questions too, if the Master doesn’t mind. Telvanni business.”

“Come closer then. Can’t have you barking your business like a seal for all the sea to hear.”

Simra gave a small sigh and crossed towards the dug-out.

The flap of roof burst open. A Dunmer child stood halfway up a rickety wood ladder, sussing him over with her eyes. A windchafed blush struck out furious across the bridge of her blunt nose and round cheeks. She wrinkled her nose and frowned so hard it was almost a grimace. “What’d you say you were?”

“Today? I’m an emissary. Means I’ve come on behalf of—”

“I know.” Balanced on a ladder rung, she cocked both hands onto her hips. Puffed up the whole skinny bundle of her torso, like a bird inflating its feathers to hide that it’s nothing but scrapmeat and hollow bones. “Don’t get to be a Mouth without you know what an ‘emissary’ is.”

“You’re the master’s Mouth?”

Her hair was thick and pale-grey, brushed up into a high explosion of a bun. It thrashed violent as she nodded. “You such a dolt I need to say it twice, Ser Scholar-Sometimes?”

“Easy there. I wasn’t doubting.”

She was mouthy enough for the title, that was for surety. Simra gave her a sussing down of his own. Oversize faded red tunic, broideries in coarse white thread all across it, hashes and crosses and stitch-scored lines, like some Dunmer did to darn their clothes, or work hardwearing strength or spells into fabric. A stone-coloured sash enveloped her whole waist and belly. Leggings of sealskin, ill-fit on her as everything else she wore. Dead folk’s clothes, Simra reckoned — hand-me-downs if not scavenged. He crept his eyes past her and down into the dug-out. Shadows, and the vague lick of light in its depths, but nothing clear or certain. No sound, no shift in the light, as of someone moving and their shadow moving with them.

When he looked back to the girl, her stare had shifted. Gone to the fire in his palm and turned hungry, wide-eyed.

Simra knew that face. How it felt to wear it, feel it in your chest. He made a fist with his left hand. The flame disappeared between his fingers.

The girl’s mouth hung open. Black gaps where her front teeth were missing and new ones not yet come through. A look on her face like he’d snatched something away from her.

A smile tugged at the corners of Simra’s mouth. He flexed his hand open again. With a small wrenching feeling – like a muscle threatening to pull or knot – the flame danced back to life. “Teach you much magic, does he? Vidanu, I mean.”

“Plenty!” the girl said, pride-pricked, almost a snarl.

“Bet he hasn’t taught you anything like this, though, hm? Nah, he wouldn’t have. Won’t. This is Ashlander magic, you know. See these?” Simra lowered himself a little, stooping closer till they were face to face. He raised a hand to his face, showing her the harrow-marks there. “These’re Ashlander marks for magicks I’ve mastered. The evil eye . . . And fire-breathing, see?” He traced the mark that curled out from his mouth, following his slow-growing grin. “Vidanu’s not here right now, is he?”

A guess, but she shook her head confirming it, rapt with huge questions and a small glimmer of fear.

“Let me in,” said Simra. “Might be I’ll have time to show you some more Ashlander magic while we wait for him. You’ve got the look of a fast learner about you. Might be you’ll learn something, even. How’s that sound? Good?”

Another great fit of nodding. She beamed, puffing up her chest again. “Follow me! Devils know what you’re waiting on!” And she disappeared down the ladder.


	65. Chapter 65

The dug-out was cut like a comet from the hard dark ground near the Tel. A slight-curling tail where the ladder stood below the entry-flap, narrow and dirt-floored, shallow. Then it widened and deepened into the main chamber, the comet’s body, bathed in cool gold light.

Wooden ribs from the keel and sides of a rowboat supported the stretched hide roof. Shelves of stacked crates, open ends facing inward, tried rough to follow the curve of one wall. Bottles filled them, jars, weights of glass and lead, scrolls crammed together like logs stored up and seasoning for Winter. Books too, organised by size and shape and what would fit where and waste no space, like rocks in a drystone wall.

A brazier of bent black iron on the room’s other side, dusted white with scorch and ash, and home now to a few embers Simra had kindled. Coal, driftwood, stones to soak up and sigh out the heat. Not much warmer than outside, but Simra sat by it even so. At least it was out of the wind.

Shaped from the wall there were two seats here. Chairs of something like fired earth, as if the packed dirt wall had been made to run and flow like mud, then set of a sudden, hard and smooth as the glaze on a pot. Magic, Simra supposed, like the run-and-reset stonework at Tel Branora. Only this was crude, made to purpose and nothing more. Temporary measures, forced to last beyond their lifetime.

“How long’ve you been here?” Simra asked.

The Mouth-Child was pacing, wandering round the small tight space. Couldn’t bring herself to sit in the other chair, maybe. Or perhaps she was only trying to stay warm. “Me? Summer just gone, and I was here for the one before. A year, then? A little more?”

“And Vidanu. He was here before you?”

“Since I can remember.” She paused to fidget with something on one of the shelves. Some disk-shaped arcanity, rings within rings of metal, from bronze to steel to silver and inward like the rounds on an archery butt towards a dull gold bullseye. She fumbled it with cold-stiff hands and adjusted one of the outer circles. A short sound like a singing-bowl, a thin-pitched hum as it turned. “Hadn’t you ought to know?” she said, without turning to face him. “Emissary and all from . . .”

“Mistress Ulessen.”

“Right. What else did she not tell you, then? About Master Vidanu?”

Simra’s gaze fell. Lay there uncomfortable on the fade-patterned carpet, dirt trod deep into its weft and its warp. His toes curled and uncurled in his boots. Felt wrong not to have taken them off, but it seemed no-one ever had in here. State of the rug said that much. “She told me he was . . . isolated, and happiest staying that way? Not one to play the games some Telvanni do. Doesn’t tread on anyone else’s feet. Not what you might call political.” That was one way to put it. A kinder way to say he was a nobody, sequestered away on a rock of an island where nothing grows.

“Not so strange for a Telvanni, is it? Keeping to his self.”

“Suppose not. But most keep a Mouth on the Assembly, as well as their household Mouth. At least for appearances . . .”

The girl turned, eyes flashing. Some tense alloy of feelings in them. Pride and hope, and worry, sharp and defensive. “Well he’s got me for now.”

“For a household Mouth,” Simra said, mild. “Right?”

“Says I can be both when I’m grown and taught and learned and all. Learned.” She said it again, two syllables now, correcting herself. “Says I can be whatever I want and it ain’t no matter I’m not wizard-born. Even had an Archmagister that weren’t Telvanni-born at all, back before the Year. An outlander, and he were Archmagister a whole fourmonth!”

Simra nodded, slow. “Mm-hm. Hard work and long life’s all it takes . . .” No sense disillusioning her. She’d do that herself in time, if she was clever. She seemed it, so far as so short a knowing could tell. Seemed restless with it. Cleverness and complacency seldom share the same skull.

“Are you not Telvanni yourself?”

Simra shook his head.

“Thought not. Don’t even talk like Tel folk.”

“I don’t, do I?”

“You word yourself different.”

“I try.”

“Don’t look it either. Where is it you’re from then? Ashlander, you said. That what you are, or’d you only learn from them? How’d you end up emissarying for Mistress Ulessen?”

“Don’t reckon it matters. Not a job I do on the oft-times. Just the one I’m doing now, that’s all.” Simra looked up, keen to steer their talk somewhere else. Jutted his head towards the small golden magelight that hung near the ceiling, like a pale Winter sun. “That one of yours? It’s good. What else has Vidanu taught you?”

“Reading, writing. Summing and subtractions. Foundational aetherdynamics and the Mundane paradigm. Static substance transmutations of base matter between states too!” She said it all rote-quick, like she’d practiced it. “That’s like when water turns to ice or steam but stays water, just in a different shape. State. Only with common metals, some stones. Ever seen liquid wood?” She craned her neck around, eyes darting. “I could show you! Only . . . not a lot of wood on Kogaris.” An embarrassed shrug and her talk tailed off as she turned half away from him.

“Hope you don’t mind my curiosity but what _is_ there a lot of here? On Kogaris?” Was that the island’s name? First time he’d heard it spoken since setting foot on its shores. Good to have it given freely at last, when he’d wandered what seemed ages in ignorance.

“Sea-jellies in Spring, when the ices melt. They come onland to lay eggs, I think? Disgusting!” She grinned, with relish. “And there’s the old torquestone quarry down island, inside the hill.”

“Torquestone?”

“Torquestone! Have you never heard of torquestone?” A satisfied whistle came out from between her missing front-teeth. “Course you’ve not. That’s only what Master Vidanu calls it, and he’s the only one knows anything about it. Him and me. You’ve seen it though. Must have? Big old hill, and the top of it all . . .” She groped for a word and came up empty. Pulled a twisted face and made a tangled curl of her fingers to show him instead. “Like someone built it that way, only it’s just like that, and growing all the time, like . . . like _toenails_!”

A moment’s amazement, then Simra swallowed it. That was where he’d spent the night. The place he’d climbed for vantage that morning. “Course. The torquestone quarry, up on the hill.”

“ _In_ the hill!”

“In the hill. Right. What is it?”

“Dunno!” said the girl, gleeful by now at having something to boast about, know about, tell him about. “Vidanu knows. Studies it! He’s not here now so he’s probably there, but that’s why he’s here in the first place, he says. Says he wouldn’t trade his Tel for any other one in the Archipelago. Might be it doesn’t have much, but it’s got a thing them others all don’t!”

“The torquestone?”

“Aye!”

“Amazing,” said Simra, almost meaning it. But in his mouth and mind, and under the root of his tongue, something was forming. The start of something useful. “Ulessen said something about something like this. Never had a name for it though. Torquestone . . . I like that.”

“That why you’re here, then?” The girl had stopped her pacing, Simra realised. She was kneeling now on the filthy carpet, rapt and staring at him again. “Is that why Ulessen sent you?”

“Depends,” said Simra. “Can you keep a secret?”

A fierce nodding.

“She sent someone else here.” Simra leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Before me, a long time ago. And he was meant to find out about the—”

“Wait! Waitwaitwait!” She was leaning too. Hopped up from her knees and onto her heels. Teetering forward on the toes of her creased and scuffed boots, and a tremble in her voice, excitement and fear. “Will Mistress Ulessen not be angry? That you told me, I mean.”

Simra eased back into the chair. Pretended to think a long and careful moment, rubbing at the scarred corner of his mouth. “Not if it means I get her what she wants. She’s practical like that. Prides herself on it.” Rubs it in everyone else’s face like a lick of common sense makes her special, Simra thought. Worst thing is it does too — at least among Telvanni. “See, she sent someone, right? Way back. To come here, study the torquestone. Only he wasn’t calling it that of course.”

“Course.”

“Thing is, this scholar she sent . . . She hasn’t heard back. Not in a long time. Thinks he might even be keeping what he knows to himself. So, she sent me to find him. Ask a few questions, but— . . . Wait. I wonder . . .” Simra’s face opened up, lit up, like with some new idea. He scratched at an eyebrow with his scarred hand, brow furrowed in thought. He was lying fast and blind now. He’d come to that point where it came smooth and effortless as falling when you’ve already fallen. Inexorable, almost unthinking, exhilarant and terrifying. “This was all before we knew about Vidanu. That he was studying the torquestone too. Now I can’t help wondering, If I found this scholar – found out what he’s keeping so quiet – d’you reckon Vidanu would like to know too?”

A slow intense nod.

“I couldn’t tell him, of course. Ulessen wouldn’t like that. Telling you’s one thing, but going direct to a rival? That’s more than my hide’s worth. But if someone helped me find this old scholar – someone who knows the island maybe – I could see myself not minding if they know too. You could take your findings home to Vidanu, if you wanted. Sure he’d be very grateful.” Simra lowered his voice further, whispering almost. Secrets within secrets. “Could even keep it to yourself though, couldn’t you? Ghosts only know sometimes it’s nice to know something your master doesn’t . . .”

“I can help,” the girl said, voice tight, almost choked. “I want to help!”

The relief flooded him. His heart went slack and slowed. Hadn’t realised till then how caged and quick it had been beating inside him. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing difficult. Maybe even easy. Just tell me — ever heard of a mer called Dalvur Vedith?”

“I . . .” She seemed crushed, even before she admitted it. Slumping shoulders and bowed spine, eyes blinking wet and fast. Simra half-pitied her. “I never heard that name.”

Simra’s jaw clenched. “Well . . .” He remembered a face of his mother’s. Fallen and cold and soft all at once, with something almost broken at the corners of her eyes. She used it when he tried to hold back from telling her things as a child, before he got better at lying. No anger in her face, just disappointment. A martyred sorrow. Do you want to hurt your poor mother? He tried that face on now, like a mask. “It was worth a try.” A small half-hearted stretch through his shoulders and neck, and he made to rise and stand.

“Wait! Wait, there’s something, maybe something else, might be nothing, but—! Aye, if he’s anywhere, if you’d find him anywhere else on the island, it’d be there.”

Simra paused. Put a glimmer of interest back into his eyes. Next to nothing, but still a thin gleaming hope. “I’m listening.”

“Well there’s the — If you go north there’s — No . . .” She shook her head, starting again to smile. “No, it’s best if I show you.”

Simra’s heart skipped and his mouth went dry. “You don’t need to. You can just tell me. I’m sure—”

“No,” she repeated, firmer now. “Best I go with you.”


	66. Chapter 66

They had an expedition ahead of them. The Mouth-Child said they ought to see about provisions, and took Simra back into the hamlet. Here.

It was a hut among other huts, long and well-made, like it might’ve housed a big family once. Just one old woman now, here in the low dark space, with every shadow smelling of trapped smoke. Walls of plaster below the ground, and stone above it, caulked tight with mortar. A shallow roof of slate and tar above that.

“. . . I’ve a mind to tell you this is the last time, Llolamae. Can’t have you just comin’ round here every once he forgets to feed you. Can’t have that be your habit, comin’ round here every once you find you need something.”

“Why not? Does you credit. D’you not feel it does? Stands you in good stead with the neighbours. Old Ma Yianni, they say, she ain’t got mouths to feed anymore but does that stop her? Does it Trouble! Good to know there’s someone whose kindness goes out beyond their doorway, they say. And not just with the neighbours. With him too, up in the Tel. I put in a good word every time, I promise you. He’ll say he’s grateful one of these days, I’ll see to it he does. Or do you not trust me?”

Simra hung back close to the doorframe, watching the Mouth-Girl and the older woman talk. All moist eyes and lined slack cheeks shivering as Ma Yianni shook her head, threw up her strong blunt worker’s hands, stared up like she was begging the ceiling for patience. All crossed arms and leaning hips from Llolamae, the little Mouth, as she crowed and praised, plied and pleaded.

Almost like a play, he reckoned. Something done often enough that it felt rehearsed, ritualised. Girl and matron, both of them knew their roles, wore their masks well, and walked the walks their parts asked of them.

But all the while they seemed to argue, Yianni bustled round her long low home, gathering and preparing. Bunched herbs and braids of onions hung amongst the rafters. She picked at them, puttered along to lift the stone off the pantry-pit an reach inside, then back to the hearth-fire, back to her cooking.

Heat and light of it on her face, licking and fluttering as she hammered out dough for panbreads. Practiced hands and forearms like a forester’s, heavy and unglamorous with the slabby muscle of long doing. Water, salt, coarse flour the colour of wet sand, a dab of wet sour mother-mix from a jar. She’d murled them together and let the lot rise. Now she slapped rounds of it onto the breadpan – a lipped shelf of seasoned iron that half-circled the growling fire – and they sizzled with oil and heat while she spoke.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Llolamae! Saints know I do my best. Only I don’t know how you’ll repay me, I’m sure I don’t.”

“When I’m up at Sadrith Mora, voice on the Assembly and all, course! Then I’ll see to it you get your fairness, and more besides.”

Yianni sighed so loud Simra heard it over the fire. Heard it across the room, in the cold and the draught of the closed doorway at his back. Then she smacked the last panbread down, and trudged over to a chest, sounding all of cluttering jars and knocking ceramic.

“And . . !” said Llolamae. “And I’ll unsnow your yard.”

“When you’re back, is that it? And only once you ever come back at all, I suppose. Gone gadding with some stranger from off-island, hm? In snows and Winter cold. Your parents’re rattling their urns right and proper over this, I tell you, and do I blame them one jot? Do I Trouble!”

“Not like we’re going all that far, Ma Yianni! Only over to the—” Llolamae stopped herself. Say too much and Simra might think he didn’t need her any longer. She knew her game, and Simra knew she knew it.

“Not far, you say? Then will you not be needing all these?” Yianni spread out an arm, winglike and expansive, at the panbreads, the simmering scuttle-kettle on the fire, the growing bundle of provisions in the old ragcloth on the worktop next to her.

Simra stopped studying the dry reeds on Yianni’s fastidious floor. Pushed himself with a foot off from leaning on the doorframe and took a careful step forward. “I’ll pay you for any extra, sera. I’ve got coin . . .”

She turned on him, bustling forward till she was armsreach, then in past armsreach. Stared up with eyes appraising and sceptical, small and red under her old heavy brow. Bent and broad, she came barely chest-height on Simra, but there was power and haste and drama in everything she did.

“And what’d I do with coin, stranger?” She prodded the air in front of his chest with a short powerful finger. Didn’t touch him, but Simra half-stepped back like he was pushed. “And in Winter? You see any merchants come shipping in on your way through the docks now did you? I think not.”

And then she’d stormed round, back to her work again. Simra didn’t reckon he could be blamed for trying, but didn’t reckon he’d try the same tack again.

“Now . . .” Yianni continued, voice softer. “If it was that you were to come by any oil on your doings. Trade for it, say, with them who—”

“Aye, Ma.” Llolamae cut her off. “Aye aye, and that’s a promise. We’ll be sure to!”

 

By the time the panbreads were done, and Llolamae had wrapped them in a clean rag and stowed them in her back-basket of woven reeds along with everything else, Yianni had opened the door for them, and pretended at surprise it was dark out.

Cold too, she said. Same drama in it as near enough everything else she said. Pronouncements and portents, even if she was only tutting over a cobweb in the corner of her dug-out hut. But age gives you that liberty, Simra reckoned. Gravity and the world’s slow decline in everything you say, and everything a symbol of something: the cricking of your knees and moving of your guts, playing out like omens that things aren’t what they were. Crowshit, but it keeps them entertained . . .

Yianni said they were staying. No question about it. Her fire was still burning. Only just put on another half-pale of coals and another round of panbreads for the night — too many for just one old woman. Simra found no fault in that logic. Dry, warmth, dinner, and bedding down under a roof. That made the simplest kind of sense before another long trek in the snow come morning. But Llolamae fidgeted and whined, like she was eager to be off, night or not.

Rustic breads but soft in their centers and golden with oil, patched and streaked black with the taste of smoke. They used them to mop up a stew of white fish and herb-infused vinegar, and onions simmered down to sweetness. Crisp salty long-pickled turnips too, up from storage, and pale stems of nutty pickled mushrooms.

Nothing much, said Ma Yianni. And at another time Simra might’ve agreed. For now though, he told her he didn’t remember having better. More than a half-truth, that, and hardly just flattery. When had he last had fresh baked bread, or something bordering onto a good square meal? Not since the mainland, seemed like, and that felt a far-fling from here.

Simra kept her fire fed. Least he could do was save her some fuel, for all the guest-graciousness she’d shown him. With Llolamae curled up in a travelcloak under a table, and Yianni gone to her pallet, screened off with panes of stretched hide, Simra laid his bedroll down by the hearthside. Stared into the flames – the dancing dark and aching night-blind light – whispering a gentle flow of power into them until he almost fell asleep.

He came back to with a jolt. The sending scroll! The blighted sending scroll in his book-bag, still unused. If not now then when? How long could he trust nothing stupid to happen because he’d disappeared with no tell left for Noor and Tammunei as to where he’d gone?

Hissing through his teeth, he uncoiled from the fireside and padded in wrapped feet over to his packs. Glower of firelight, murmuring its wax and wane like the sound of a heartbeat, sometimes fast and sometimes slowing to almost nothing. He went by touch mostly, pawing over the bags until he found the waxed leather of his book-bag and unfastened the drawstring and flap that sealed it. Brought out the tight roll of paper, fought into his boots, and half-guessed a path to the door.

Out into the night before he finally dared a magelight. Red cold glow, and new snow ghosting down into it. Of course. A journey to go the next day, and of course he was out here, hacking chunks off his sleeptime and shivering in the same snow that’d make tomorrow a time or two crueler. Of course.

He stamped through the yard outside, getting his bearings. Raised beds, empty for winter, with flat heads of stacked up snow. A fence of old rope and pile-driven poles, bordering round Yianni’s claim. He spotted a low rick, fermenting urns inside it, big as fat children squatting under its little roof. Simra forged a path to it and crouched amongst them. A little shelter was better than none.

The scroll unfurled in his hands. A long narrow ribbon of paper, like he imagined you’d tie to the leg of a messenger bird. Funny almost, how this served that same purpose. He turned it, getting the script and sigils the right way up. He let go with a hand and slapped the palm flat into his forehead.

“Stupid . . .”

He’d need something to make it work. Sympathy. A connection. Something of Tammunei or Noor’s. He thought for a long moment, head bowed and the back of his neck stretching tight, then warm and soft under the weight of it.

“Well fuck me for not carrying round a lock of hair from everyone with the sour luck to keep my company . . .”

Then Simra clicked his fingers, clenched a fist. A thought. He stormed back into the hut and groped for his sword-belt, bringing out the blade. It had been Tammunei’s for a time. A short time, but it’d have to do.


	67. Chapter 67

The night’s snow seemed to close around him, but Simra got no colder. More like he lost feeling, sinking into a space of thought and sight and blunted hearing. Nothing here to touch; nothing that could be touched. Everywhere he looked, the world had blurred and smeared. Life through a grimy window, a grit-damaged lens. Fog.

A moment’s confusion; almost panic. Simra made himself breathe. Concentrated on the sound of that – the tremble of his inhale and the shake of its outhale – and realised how much sound it was in a world that had fallen silent. He thought his own name. Thought it hard. Thought himself back to how he’d got here. He’d held the sword. Read the sending scroll. He was the sending. What he sent was himself.

And then he was somewhere else. Not Yianni’s yard anymore, among the raised beds and the falling snow, and the cloud-blind starless skies. But he wondered if he was still there, bodied there, and brain throwing thoughts and sense out across the world. No matter, he tried to convince himself. Just semantics. But it stuck in the back of his mind like a fishbone.

He squinted, thought hard, like by thinking he could see through the fog. It half worked. There was bald rock beneath his boots. The sense of a wide night sky in a high and airy place. The sense of a tall overhang of rock. And at the heart of it, an enclosure of familiar things: knotted cord, stretched hide, spars of bone that felt noisy to think about, hard to focus on. Tammunei’s yurt.

Fuck this, he thought, half amazed by it all. Being here and not here. Being almost nowhere. Being no longer where he was, and holding tight to who he was with a whole hard-working part of his mind, like it could slip his grasp, flit off and be gone, like a scrap of paper carried away in a gale.

He forged himself forward. It wasn’t quite walking. More the thought of walking, and the memory of it, as a way to push the idea of him closer to where he knew the yurt was. Was he here? To what bent and blurred extent was he here? The more he focused on one thing, the more the rest seemed to shift and shiver. Like he was walking in a memory. Like there was no ground under him unless he kept it in sight. A gaping hungry fog at his back as he looked and moved himself forward, and this whole world ready to blink from existence whenever he closed his eyes.

“Hello?” He called it out. Again that sense of sound giving edge and enormity to the silence. He halfway hated it. Was almost cowed into not speaking again. But wasn’t that the whole blighted point of a sending? To talk? “Tammu! Noor? It’s Simra. I … I don’t know?” Simra winced, closing his eyes. Let slip the world and made himself and his voice the whole of what he knew. Tried to, at least. It was hard. Let the world slip and have faith he could make it come back. “Can you hear me?”

Someone else now, drawing their careful way closer. Not sight so much as a collection of memories, signed on the surface of his thoughts, and recognised as clear as a face. Sea-wet fabric and stoneflowers. Freckles and wet red hair.

“Tammunei?”

“Who’s there?” The voice was faraway, creased and cut with echoes. There – there there – air. “Simra..? Are you there? Where are you?”

Simra focused on the sound, the speaker, making them clearer and closer. Almost lost himself and his place as he did it. No knowing how long he was there, stunned and stuck, struggling for how to answer. “I’m—” No, not the whole truth. Just what mattered. “—I’m here. Don’t know for how long.”

Tammunei coalesced closer. Almost a shade, small and slump-shouldered. Simra could almost make out the shape of them through the fog when he opened his eyes a moment to see if that helped bring them closer, make them clearer. It didn’t. Tammunei was still a shimmering fragile something — tremulous, like an eye itching to let go tears. Simra could feel it. Nerves and uncertainty. Relief brimming up like drink past the top of a cup, but held rapt and impossible in meniscus. Just a moment before it crests and breaks, and spills lostwards out of itself.

“No you’re not. Not here.” The words broke up. “Simra, I don’t know where you … don’t know how you … but you’re safe?”

“I’m safe. I’m alright.”

“Ancestors, Simra, I thought you were — I thought I was hearing you. I was afraid. You were gone and then back like this? I thought—”

“It’s a sending,” Simra cut in, not wanting to consider what Tammunei was suggesting. Is that what would happen? No Ghostline to go to. Just a voice in the minds of the only people who cared enough to remember him? “They gave me a scroll.”

“Why can’t I see you? If I stare – if I half-close my eyes like I’m staring into the sun – I can almost see … snow? Dust, dancing? Snow, and a shadow in it.”

“It’s snowing here, yeah.”

“Was it the Telvanni? We went to the tower, or we tried to. We couldn’t cross because they wouldn’t let us. What did they do to you?”

“I’m safe. Nothing done. Nothing bad. Just gave me this scroll for a sending so I could tell you, but … it’s hard?” Hard just to have things straight in his mind. Like time was twisted here, and wild to hold. “Needed some tie to you so I could come through clear but I don’t know, didn’t have anything good, so it’s like I’m not anywhere and you’re not here and I can’t quite hear?” Simra wheezed a small laugh, powerless, confused. “It’s fucked, but I have to — dunno how long I’ve got, so…”

A listening silence.

“I’m alright,” Simra began, speaking slow. “Just far from where you are. Up at the tower. Telvanni gave me a job and I couldn’t not take it. Couldn’t take anyone else either. I’ll try explain, just not now. Some day. Soon, honest. I’m somewhere … North I think?”

“Noor was angry. She thought—”

“I’m sure she fucking did. Tell her I’m not gone. That I couldn’t help it. And tell her I’m coming back, soon as I can. Just as soon as I—”

And then the fog was all he could see, eyes closed or not, whether he was trying to see or not. A whiteness that stole his breath and his words, and a silence that filled him like water.

It was cold back in Yianni’s yard. At first he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Just the glaring painful fact of being bodied again, feeling again, and seeing the snow as it fell around him. It had settled on his shoulders. On the bowed top of his head. His jaw ached and the teeth inside it hurt, like they’d strained all this time, trying to chatter. His bare hand was clutched round the scabbard of a sword, stinging in the blue-knuckled cold. He thought again how he ought to get himself some gloves. It was long past time. Long, long past time.

 

Next morning, the sky was dull as tin. Clouds moved flat across it, smooth and fast, like the surface of a stream. Simra looked outside, slipping back into his boots and going out to piss a hole in the new-fallen snow. His footprints from the night before had already filled in, with no sign he’d ever been out. But even the snow had stopped by now, and settled into a slow half-hearted dawn. He wondered if it’d be full-broken by the time they came to leave.

Inside, Yianni was already at the hearth, breaking up the ashes and clearing fresh space in the dust. Bent over it, hunched towards it, cold and poking at the cold stones and cinders. The morning made her look more her age, whatever that might’ve been. Cold light and white ashes.

“Let me.” Simra tripped out of his boots again and passed over to the hearthside.

“T’lonya.” She said it with a dip of her head and slitted smiling eyes. Like it meant gratitude and not infant, pride of my crib, swaddled thing. Good child. “You’ve a long journey ahead of you, as I hear tell, and I don’t know that you’ll breakfast yourself right if I don’t take a hand to it… But lighting fires? That you can do.”

She went to the corner where her pantry was kept between pit and preserve-chest. Left Simra feeling strange. T’lonya. It pulled at him, unexpected. His mother had called him almost the same word, long ago. Long and long ago, but often. Seemed Yianni would mother anyone, given the chance. He could think of worse things than staying a while. Lighting fires and eating well, his feet warm and dry. Feeling younger than he was for once. Probably he was tired from a night broken into pieces, but it put a thickness in his throat and the first threat of an ache in his eyes to think of it. Home, and here, and how he hadn’t stayed then, and couldn’t now.

Instead he steepled up fuel in the hearth and with his hands and a word set it burning. Went to his packs and unhitched his kettle. Boiled water for tea.

It played in his thoughts though, what he could’ve used the sending scroll for, and what he hadn’t.

He’d not written home since Balmora. Waiting there among the broken bits of the town four days longer than he’d have liked just to beg passage for a piece of folded paper on a boat bound to Blacklight, where maybe it would find another headed to Windhelm. He’d written it while he still could, back by Lake Amaya, not knowing it would be one of the last things he wrote for a stretched sparse year. He had always meant to take it seaward for sending but never found the time, back when his days were so full of nothing. And by the time it finally got to Balmora, it felt like a letter from some stranger – like he was only carrying it for them – so much had changed since he wrote it. None of that got into the letter. He couldn’t have written it in, not even if he’d wanted to. He sent it all the same, for all that time had turned its words to lies: all’s well with me…

He could’ve sent home and spoken with his mother like he was there. So why didn’t he? Could even have sent to Soraya, wherever she was, whoever she’d become. Might’ve been easier, even — in the rattling pouch amongst his bags he had better ties to them both than the sword that’d been Tammunei’s. But he didn’t send to them. Might be he’d taken the sensible road, the responsible one. Might be he’d done what asked least of him — least courage, least hope and blind faith. Anycase, it was done with. Gone and past.

Under her table, Llolamae stirred, thrashing free of the cloak she’d slept in. She ducked out and into the open, and shuffled over to the hearthside, cloak held shut in a fist at her throat. “Smelled tea,” she said, groggy.

It was black, fermented, smelling of malt and mushrooms as it steeped in Simra’s kettle. “Mhm,” he said, distracted. He was remembering pine-needle smoke, and the crude tea of the Grey Quarter, cut with roast barley, and bought in bulk whenever they could afford it.

“Tea and then gone,” she said. “Not a lot of daylight in the days this time of year.”


	68. Chapter 68

Tea and then gone, out into the day, tin-bright and brittle. Felt like it was waning no sooner than the dawn had finished and the sun got into the fullness of its rise.

Llolamae and Simra hurried their way through the morning. Tramping shuffling feet through the snow as the cold set it stiff and their boots crushed and packed it. They went quick. The hustle that falls just short of a run, hard to keep up, harder still to keep time, keep gait. No matter how gliding your walk or graceful your run, that mixed gait always comes graceless.

They’d kept an incomplete quiet so far. Breath short from a long time keeping up their loping pace; wind invasive and aching in their ears, for all Simra had shawled his scarf up and over his head. But Simra’s thoughts were loud, and sometimes it was hard to say nothing when there was someone around to hear him, even if the wind would steal his words like as not. Better that way maybe, to talk and not be heard.

He’d asked questions. Pointed out what stuck out, interrupting the snowfields. Hard not to, when a surprise comes so sharp at you out of all that sameness. A rock carved with a worn old face. Shrubs labouring up through the snow and out of the stony soil, fighting the breeze in vain for their right to be trees one day. Shrubs, their fingertips blistered with small stiff purple flowers, their wood looking it might be fragrant when burnt: dry, corded and twisting, all perennial with hidden resin maybe, or why else would they flower and leaf this late in the year. Simra asked if he ought to go over. Who knew when they’d next see wood for burning. Llolamae said nothing. At first he reckoned she hadn’t heard, and he asked again. Leave them alone, she said. Why? Simra asked. They poisonous? No, she said, just doing their best in a bad place to do it. And Simra kissed his teeth and went on shivering. Said at least it wasn’t snowing again. At least they weren’t wet as well as cold.

The headland was the next thing he called out as it sheered from the distance. The sea chased deep into the land ahead, cutting a curving channel through the island’s side. A long peninsula spurred high and stony on the far edge of it. Along their side, a low rocky headland bearing slow and northward.

They crested up and along it. The sea spat and raced on their right. He didn’t know which way the tide was turning but whether in escape or assault the run of the water was furious.

Here the rock was too rough or dark somehow for the snow to have settled on. It had turned straight to rain. That was what caught his attention, even from afar. A ragged crackle of black in all this scorching whiteness of snow. Salt, Simra realised. The stone was crusted with it, sprain up from the sea and warding the snowfall away. Putting out his tongue to wet his lips, he tasted it too. On a sunny day – a dry day – the rocks might have glittered. What became of this island in Summer? What Spring might come after a Winter that cuts the rest of the year from memory, from imagining, till all you can think of is snow and shuddering, frozen mud, like that’s all a year might be made of? It was that way in Windhelm. Maybe here too. Or maybe just inside Simra. Some leftover linger of Eastmarch, never quite gone from him.

“Got a question,” he said, breaking the silence again. He wasn’t panting, from the way up the headland, but exertion still made his words taste wrong. Sour, strange, cold.

“Ask it then,” said Llolamae. Didn’t turn her head. Simra watched her back, draped with a shapeless coat of sealskins stitched together and billowing lazy with the wind and their own thick heaviness. “Don’t reckon I could stop you, could I?”

“S’nothing important. Just a curiosity. Just…Yianni. What is she? Some auntie of yours?”

Llolamae gave a bleating laugh. “Not hardly. She’s just an old widow is all.”

“Yeah?”

“Heartshare was a fisherman, see? Only he got lost at sea, like fishermen do. Came back after days out there, adrift, but he came back with a chill and that carried him off, like chills do. But even after that she had five children. Way back, way way back, mind. All gone to sea, in their time, and not come back. One out in a fisherboat, saw a dreugh in the water, and that’s luck you know – a good catch – and she stayed out too long on too bad a sea chasing that catch. Lost the same way as her father. The others off on boats bound for the red lands – Vvardenfell – maybe to get rich in ways folk can’t here. Chasing trueglass and such.”

Llolamae paused a moment, hands on hips, in front of a shoulder-high ledge in the headland. Then scrambled up in a kicking of feet and wrench of arms. She turned and faced Simra, crouching, face framed small by a big hat of waxed leather with earflaps hanging long to the level of her chest.

“Why you come over so curious about her?” she says.

“Maybe I’m just hungry,” he said. “Might be she surprised me. Kind, right?”

Llolamae’s face fidgetted between expressions. Flash of disbelief, flickering confusion, a purse-mouthed scowl of disbelief. “Do folk not feed each other where you’re from?”

“Feasts, summoning days, yeah. But not like that, just because they’re — what? Worried? For someone else’s child?”

“Strange.” A flash of pity, then gone into a wrinkled nose and squinting eyes. “Not like she’s made to. She likes to is all. Whole town knows she’s lonesome, and bored worse than that, and still keeps the best kitchen-garden on the island. She’s got the habit leftover from birthing five babies, feeding and clothing ‘em, and that doesn’t just go away.”

“I reckon not.” Simra glanced along the ledge. No better way to get up than here. He set his hands and reached with his leg and shinned up and onto it to crouch then stand beside her. “D’you have kin though?”

“Wouldn’t have Vidanu if I did.” She shrugged. “Not since I was a fry. Ma and Da got dust-sick one Summer and I’ve been a Mouth since then.” She stood up and shrugged again, and turned and walked on.

Simra stayed rooted a moment, a downcurl in the corner of his mouth as he chewed the inside of his cheek. He found himself hoping Vidanu fed her right, knowing full well that he didn’t, or why else would she know Yianni so well as she seemed to? Found himself hoping at least Vidanu was kind when he wasn’t absent. That he treated and taught her well. An uncertain unwelcome pang of something that might have been pity or sadness or foreboding. Anger, almost, at what this child had been given for a childhood.

A twisting deep-reaching feeling, then, like a frown with roots that gnarled in his belly, conflicting him. In between pitying her, Simra realised he envied her. What must it be like, growing up with a teacher, in letters and magic and how much else besides? Knowing that however little you have now, you have prospects, and promise, power all laid out ahead of you, bright and better things. Not just the place you started out, sucking like mud around your feet and trying to trap you, keep you, sink you to the neck and deeper unless you struggle your way free of it…

Stepping fast to catch up, Simra followed after her. Shook his head and closed his eyes for a long blink and told himself there was no good comparing. The past was the past and behind him, and the future was his to set forth. She couldn’t say the same. Not like he wanted to be a Mouth anycase. Not like he’d do it if they begged. Bad enough to be a left hand for some magelord like he was now. How much worse would it be, to be a whole body for them?

Llolamae scampered over the rocks ahead, meandering just for the joy of movement, playing her way across the island. Simra watched as he walked, and went back to feeling sorry for her. Outclipsed by pity, his envy shrank up so fast it turned almost to shame.


	69. Chapter 69

Llolamae led an aimless way up the island, slow on her shorter legs. Simra, yearning through the waste and white of this place, walked silent in her tracks, treading the same trench through the snow. His tongue was stiff and dry with thirst and the cold had set his jaw. But his eyes raced and his mind worked, gnawing at anything, hungry for anything, breaks in the boredom, the crisp sharp sameness.

Wheels of birds whirled overhead, like the stone in a sling before it’s loosed, and like a slinger’s stone sometimes one would swoop and shrike like lightning earthward. Simra wondered if there might be hares here, hid white against the glare to all eyes but the eyes of eagles, hawks, buzzards — whatever they might have been. But who was to say they were hares? Simra wouldn’t bet on it here. Wouldn’t even bet the flying things were birds, and anycase he wasn’t about to ask.

They crossed a low part of the island that in warmer times might’ve been marsh. Turned along that fencourse to strike a path inland. Reeds quivered up from frozen water; ill-footing over snow-worried ice. It was eerie to feel all this emptiness. A world so inert and so ancient with cold it might as well have been dead for how deep and sound asleep it was.

Winter’s many things, Simra reckoned, and a foreign country is one of them. A land buried beneath itself. A land that lays itself over the land; a second half-world of its own. And he asked himself, then told himself: Tammunei would’ve felt life here. Wouldn’t they? They would. Frogs that turned to ice and unfroze with the creeks and the mud come Spring. Something like that. But alone he didn’t know what to make of it. Nothing but nothing. He was who he was, and ought to have understood Winter, but no season’s more opaque.

“Turf pit,” said Llolamae, stepping cursory round a deep hack taken from the ground. “Must be we’re close now.”

Simra stood and hugged himself; craned to look down. A square trench, sides patterned almost like tiles or bricks with the careful cut and delve of a spade. Speech unstuck his jaw. His teeth began again to chatter. “Close to what? You still haven't told me."

“Well, people, for one.” She made a face, nose wrinkled, eyes bugged and skewed. “Or have you known turf to cut itself?”

Simra’s mood was fouled already. The place, the time, the cold. Might be all the water here was frozen, but still damp was finding its way into his boots, and he couldn’t remember when last he felt his toes. “You making an idiot of me? If you are, you’d better not be.” He growled it, regretting every word as soon as it came out. Stupid, even without her say so. Silence would’ve been better, but the chance for that was already past. So Simra leaned full into talking now. Started, and let it go. “Keep me in the dark to keep yourself needed, right? I get that. Been there. But sooner or later you’ll need to tell me what’s up here and how you reckon it’s got a single spitsworth of relevance to Dalvur Vedith. I can be patient, but I’d sooner it was soon.”

Llolamae pouted and set her face. Looked like she was holding back some kind of break, like she had in her disappointment, last he’d mentioned Vedith’s name. She’d never heard it before; went stiff-faced and stubborn with sadness at feeling she couldn’t help.

Simra softened his shoulders, unsharped his eyes and tongue. Hungry, cold, footsore, and lost for all he knew — none of that made him feel better for having barked like that at a child who’d done him no wrong. “Look, I’m sorry…” he began. “That wasn’t good of me. Just…I’m trusting you here. I’d rather that trust cut both ways.”

She shrugged like it was nothing. Had never been other than nothing. “Not like I know much to tell you about the island’s north. Just that folk in the south don’t know much about it, and if anyone Telvanni was hiding here without Vidanu’s knowing it, it’d be there.”

“People, though. That’s what you said?”

“Ashlanders.” Another shrug. Her feet shuffled and she looked quick over one shoulder at the way they ought to be going. She wanted to be off again — or else not being asked questions she couldn’t answer.

“Ashlanders?” Simra’s stomach sank and rose with a lurch. “What kind?”

“The bone spears and cut-up faces kind?” She pulled a fraction of that face again; the one that made him out to be dim-witted. “The dangerous kind you don’t go near to know much about.”

“I mean what tribe.”

“Why would I know?”

“Reckon it’s quicker to ask what you do know about them then.”

In Llolamae’s eyes, the start of a grin. “That they walk the island’s north, yearwise, and have different camps for different times. That they don’t wrap up for the cold and instead they mix paints up from seal grease and other things – blood maybe – to magic themselves warm. That they bury food and treasure all around the island for when they’re next camping near, and they leave their ancestors in the ground with it to protect it. Or maybe the food and treasure’s for the ancestor-ghosts to eat? You hear it different from different people…” Her arms wheeled and thrashed in the air. Her breath steamed heavy from her grinning gurning mouth. “That they eat any flesh that’s going, fish, beast, mer – anything! – and they eat it raw and you oughtn’t to go up island ever for that reason!”

Simra chewed his lip. “If they use magic paint to keep themselves warm,” he said, “and they don’t cook their food, why would they need to cut peat?”

Her wheeling arms and talking hands stopped and fell silent. “…like I said, you hear it different from different folk.”

“Reckon we’ll find out soon,” Simra offered.

 

They walked into higher land, maybe tending northward. The frozen riverbed changed from wide narrow fen, stiff and sleeping, to a cut between rising banks. Ice in its middle, slopes of thick-lodged snow either side. Higher and higher those snowbanks loomed, and deeper he walked through their shadow, Simra worried they'd fall. Collapse and bury him. Made him afraid to speak. Afraid of the sound of his footsteps, scuff and scuffling over the ice. Short strides now, sliding one foot in front of the other.

“Don’t like it down here,” he hissed, almost a whisper. “Like everything up there can see down onto us, but we’re blind to everything except what’s ahead. Even that only to the next bend.”

“Want me to climb up, take a look round, do you?” Llolamae didn’t turn to face him. She was watching her feet too.

“Be nice, yeah. If you don’t, I will.”

A thinking silence, and then Llolamae rolled her shoulders. Shifted the weight of her hat on her head with a careless hand. “Alright.”

Simra sighed a cloud of mist, relieved and grateful. “Alright. Call down what you see? Only…don’t shout, alright?”

She did look round at that. A puzzled look, but she didn’t ask why. Just stretched, slapped her mittened hands each against the other, and choose a likewhile piece of bank. Began to scramble up it, hands and feet and speed, back hunched and toes kicking holds in the snow.

She went out of view as she overed the top. Left Simra with nothing but sky, and the muffled blue shade of the dead river, the trench.

“Hills,” he heard her say. “Bald high places. Stone and snow.”

“Not missing much then?” Simra said.

No response. He walked on. He’d spoken low, too quiet maybe to hear. But in seven paces, Llolamae screamed.

Swearing under his breath, Simra made for the nearest bank. Half-slipped in his haste on the ice. Wallowed with furious slowness up the bank, feet and fingers digging into the loose snow as it kicked down in chunks and slides behind him, beneath him. In his head, in his motions, he was fighting already. Fight up the bank. Find her. Fight whatever fight was waiting. Bone spears, he thought. Bone spears and cut-up faces.

He crested the lip of the bank on hands and knees. Numb, he fumbled for his sword. Found it, and his hand stung against the pommel, the one brief quillon. The palm was still skinned from climbing the tangle of torquestone on the hill two nights ago. Tender now, and wet with snow. He’d forgot till that moment, and now forgotten everything else. Just his stinging hand, just that scream, and the sudden lurch of space and wide snow around him that crazed his eyes for searching it.

It took only a moment to see them. Three skinny figures, near-naked and painted in dull greyish red. And like a fish hooked on two lines, stuck taut by the two-way pull of them, Llolamae was frozen between the threat of their lowered spearpoints, coiled to bolt and pinned in place.


End file.
